I felt like exploring a word palette today. I wanted to break habits of thought and sentence structure. So I began by listing word combinations inspired by my backyard surroundings. After creating the list, I could imagine the possibility of a poem. What was missing was some central organizing perspective or voice. As I wrote,…

Suspension of disbelief in fiction is tricky. What logic or laws of reality is one willing to put aside for the sake of story? I personally find myself become less and less tolerant of stories that abuse such rules without a good reason to do so. Sometimes genre comes with its own exceptions. How often…

The question, as always, is how to begin a story. This question is further complicated by the time-travel genre. One way or another, narrative threads will overlap. A character hurled into the past, intentionally or accidentally, is aware of a future. Some element of the narrative is inherently retrospective, even if that character’s current circumstances…