<span class="vcard">Blaze Ward</span>
Blaze Ward

Science Fiction Mystery

The mystery category starts with a crime, then resolves it by the end. Simple formula, with nearly infinite variations possible. Science fiction takes that premise and runs with it. Science fiction is a setting genre. As such, you simply start out with “Not Here, Not Now” (presumably a technological future and a surfeit of magic, or you would be in a fantasy category) and tell your story. Where you set your story (the world-building elements) can be pretty much anywhere. If you have magic, presumably you are in some sort of fantasy category, as noted above, but it might be...

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Thrillers and Mysteries

Thriller gets its own top-level category these days, so you can dive in over there and go deep, but I want to take a moment to talk about it in the crime and mystery context. Until recently, thriller was a sub-genre of the larger crime category. What changed? Indie Publishing. So many Indie started writing thrillers that it got moved out to become its own BISAC top level. What is thriller, then? Energy. Pure and simple. Start generally somewhere in the middle, and then amp up everything, running like hell. Usually with a ticking clock or a burning building. Kidnapping....

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Anthologies: How to Create, Edit, and Publish an Anthology

What is an Anthology? Classically, there are two specific definitions you need to know about short fiction. A Collection is a group of stories, all by the same author. An Anthology, conversely, is a group of stories by a variety of different authors. We’re here to talk about the latter. Generally, an anthology has a central theme, around which all the authors involved have written. It might be sword and sorcery fantasy. Or hard-boiled private detectives. Or military science fiction. (I’ve owned and read all of those at one time or another.) Alternatively, it might be part of a “Year’s...

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The Indie Mindset

Let’s talk mindset. Many of you have come out of the Traditional Publishing (TradPub for short) world, either directly, or having been raised and trained to think that way. You see a specific career arc that you need to follow, in order to achieve success. Does this sound familiar? Start in short fiction, honing your craft at 5000-word stories until you think you have the ability to write a pretty good story for one of the periodicals in your genre. Then you start submitting them and to various open anthology calls until you start to achieve some level of success....

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Sexuality in Science Fiction

I’m going to approach this topic from two directions, so bear with me. The US and a bunch of other places have inherited British legal systems that dates back a Very Long Time™. A lot of places inherited Christianity as a “State Religion.” Both have a strong emphasis on heterosexual marriage (One Man, One Woman) as the basis for a lot of other things, including most of your rights as a person. In the old days, people had more freedom to be non-cissexual. Scientific research these days suggests that roughly ten percent of the population is definitively homosexual (a 6...

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