What if the supervillains won, and then hid behind a front-facing good-guy façade? That could be an interesting premise for a TV show*.  Particularly so given the ongoing revelations about the private peccadillo’s and past-times of the real world’s elites.  We live in a time when the panopticon allows the...

That Thomas Plutarch, what a prodigiously productive writer! The latest in the shared-universe series, Heroes Unleashed dropped into the market this week, and it’s a little bit different from the previous fare.  Morgon Newquist’s Heroes Fall and Kai Wai Cheah’s Hollow City took a more traditional and fast paced approach...

Do you like the Rocky refence in the title?  Sorry, it’s got nothing to do with today’s naked shilling for the fourth issue of StoryHack Magazine. If you think you know what happened last night at O’Reilly’s, you don’t know the half of it. This issue features the third...

Watching Amazon’s The Boys – more on that soonish – reminded me of my last desperate days stuck under the thumb of the Dinosaur Publishers.  Back in the bad old days when I only rarely dipped my toes into NYC publishing waters in search of a rare good read,...

It turns out that rebuilding an sf/f publishing civilization from the ruins left behind by the Boomer generation requires a lot of effort on a lot of different fronts.  The one that we upstarts in the publishing world seek to rebuild is a complex civilization, and carving our own pale...

Is it just me, or did this feel a lot like a Stephenson novel? It features the weird future of Snowcrash and the abrupt lurch of an ending of… Well, pretty much every novel Stephenson ever wrote. Not a complaint.  Just an observation.  Nick Cole’s first-person spycraft novels typically feature...

Gag stories.  They’re a lot harder than most writers realize, particularly when the joke at the core of the story has to sustain several thousand words.  Not joke stories that amount to one long setup for a snappy punchline, but full blown shaggy dog stories that revolve around an...

This might be my favorite story in this issue of Cirsova.  Xavier Lastra, the author of The Elephant Idol, is a good friend of mine.  He has edited a few of my short stories, and his blog has played a vital role in improving my writing.  Reading this story reminds...

Lost tribe tales set in the modern day fell out of fashion shortly after the last few corners of the map were filled in by intrepid explorers.  The extra challenge of squeezing a bit of mystery into our digitized and sanitized world thwarts many a good adventure tale. Harold...

Long flights with no laptop and an empty reading queue on the trusty kindle make things so dull that one might be tempted to run through a quick scan of the free Hollywood fare provided by the airline.  That’s how I discovered the little gem of Stan and Ollie. ...