LAURENCE MACNAUGHTON

  • How do authors create an imaginary world from scratch? This weekend, I’ll offer writers some world-building tips at MileHiCon in Denver. Can’t make it to the convention? No worries. Here are the answers to eleven of your burning world-building questions. MileHiCon:…

  • Ever wanted to know how a science fiction or fantasy author builds an imaginary world? Authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Frank Herbert, William Gibson and scores of others are renowned for the worlds they’ve created. What makes…

  • Last Christmas, my trouble-making brother got me hooked on the new Pathfinder fantasy card game. (The best part: it’s cooperative. You and your friends work together to try to beat the deck. Plus, you can play the same character every game, gaining…

  • I know so many writers who claim that they need absolute silence in order to write. I used to be one of them. As I write this, we’re having a hardwood floor refinished in the room directly above my office.…

  • You could WIN a free paperback copy of The Spider Thief: Omnibus from IndieHouseBooks.com! Click here to enter. > IndieHouseBooks.com: The Spider Thief begins with a con artist suffering amnesia. That’s an unusual choice for thriller. What made you want to…

  • “The gold spider,” Andres said in a resonant Spanish accent. “Her power will belong to me.” The crisp mountain air washed over Ash like a torrent of cold water. It whispered across waves of tan grass, carrying the scent of…

  • Some names stick with us. Bridget Jones, Holden Caulfield, Nero Wolfe — these names are all indelibly stamped into our literary consciousness. Those names are evocative. Memorable. Unique. Some writers are incredibly good at coming up with names. I am…

  • When I first heard about Booktrack.com from my literary agent, Kristin Nelson, I was fairly skeptical of the idea. Ebooks with music and sound effects, really? But then I tried the Booktrack of the short story Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft. I’ll be honest—I was…

  • Who else loves free ebooks? The fine folks over at Freebooksy.com hand-picked The Spider Thief as a featured title today, so I might as well brag a little bit . . . AND give away a bunch of ebooks! Free…

  • I once got to hear Orson Scott Card talk about his writing method. He went on at great length about how the voices of his characters talked to him. The voices told him to do this, he said, the voices…

From the blog

  • Want to Get Published? Read This.

    I’ve talked to dozens of best-selling authors about their early years, before they were published. And the similarities between them are striking. On average, they wrote about half a dozen unpublished manuscripts before they sold a novel. (By the way, this is what I call the Myth of the First Novel. Because it’s hardly ever…

  • Compelling Character Arcs in 4 Easy Steps

    I’ll let you in on a secret: readers want your character to change. They know, deep down, that your character is unhappy with the status quo at the beginning of your book. Something is terribly wrong in your character’s life, and things can’t keep going on this way. Something’s got to give. Readers fervently hope…