The AFICTIONADO® Blog

Boskone 58 is coming! Join me at Boskone February 12 – 14, 2021. This year the convention will be online, so it is easy to join one of the best science fiction and fantasy conventions anywhere. This will be a fun weekend filled with discussions of books, science, art, games, music, and more. Check out […]

First post of the new year and, hopefully, bringing to a conclusion a lot of work from last year.  First, Accidental Warrior: The Unlikely Tale of Bloody Hal is now out as an audiobook.  You can find Hal’s story in audio on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.  This has been a while coming but I hope you […]

How should teenagers speak?  Okay, that’s a loaded question.  Let’s re-state the question: how should teenagers speak in the book that you’re reading (or writing)? Should they should sound like they just stepped out of a twenty-first century American high school? Or, especially if the book is a fantasy, should they be using the same, […]

Handwavium.  What is it and why do reviewers excoriate writers over it?  Well, handwavium in science fiction is when an author writes about a scientifically impossible idea without attempting to create a basis for it; essentially, the author says, “It is because it is.”  This seems to come up mostly regarding starflight or FTL (faster […]

The audiobook for Accidental Warrior is completed and off to QA at ACX!  I’m hoping this process won’t take more than a few weeks but, with everything else that has been upended during this pandemic, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  In the meantime, it’s back to working on getting Complicated finished and ready for publication.  That is now […]

Spent a lot of time from Thursday through Sunday online with the Mars Society meeting. As I’ve noted before, this is not a science fiction convention; it is a dead-serious society of people dedicated to putting a real settlement on Mars. The only relationship to science fiction is that the Mars Society aims to turn […]