Hello, dear readers and lost wanderers of the Internet. Welcome to my site!

As some of you are hopefully aware, I am a novelist who writes in the fantasy genre. I am currently shopping around a manuscript to agents and editors, and have two other projects in the works. However, seeing as how it takes roughly two years for an author to go from obtaining representation to having their debut novel on shelves, we have some time to kill. In the interim, I will do my best to entertain you with a different sort of writing - blogging. Everyone loves a good blog. Hopefully I can be a good on these pages as I am on . . . well, the pages of my books. And, hey, if you enjoy my articles enough to check out my books once they hit the shelves, it’s a win-win scenario for all.

At this time, my plans for this blog cover three categories of articles

• Recent Reads: Book reviews, some as one-part critiques and others as deep-dive retrospectives, providing an opportunity to both discover new stories and to learn from examples of both good and bad writing.

• Missed the Mark: Sometimes, our best intentions for a story don’t come on the page. It’s always easier to see what went wrong in hindsight. With the benefit of those lessons, we can learn and grow and become better writers. Thus, in Missed the Mark, we will review recent stories that were presented to the audience with obvious message or concept in mind, identify where they fell flat, and try to develop alternative narratives that enhance the story while preserving the intent of the original creators.

• If They Planned It All Ahead: Long-running stories, especially serialized ones, are often victims of their own longevity. Sometimes the story outlives the originally planned narrative or even the original concept. Other times, an adaptation of existing source material will fail to include key details early on and need to play a messy game of catch-up. Then there are the cases where there was never any plan at all, or where multiple creators fight for control of the narrative. In this series, we will explore examples of stories that would have desperately benefited from a comprehensive roadmap, identify where wrong turns were taken, and then try to flesh out an alternative story that repairs and unifies the narrative while preserving as much of the original story as possible.

Get comfortable, folks. We’ve got time. Let’s have some fun.