Disclosure: a version of this essay first appeared here The books of the Were Chronicles might be the most ambitious thing I have ever attempted, and that includes highly complex novels like “Secrets of Jin Shei” where I had to keep track of eight full-time protagonists and what their particular stories were doing at any […]

The issue of “relatability” is not a new one, although the word describing it has been a relatively recent arrival in modern dictionaries. In a recent essay in the New Yorker of all places, Rebecca Mead opens up by a critic’s dismissal of King Lear, in particular, and Shakespeare, in general, as not being “relatable”. Given […]

I often encourage aspiring novelists to write short fiction, which is a bit ironic, since I began my career writing novels and didn’t sell my first short story until I had my fourth novel in production. But this is a classic case of “do as I say and not as I do.” Or did. Writing […]

  Part of the problem of writing the other, writing about a culture one has researched rather than the culture  you are familiar with from the inside, is that it depends so fundamentally not just on WHAT is  said, but on HOW it is said. So a component of the problem becomes not just approaching […]