Author: JRVogt

There are some disturbing animal trends breaching the horizon. The future looks bleaker than ever. I was holding out for a mutated lizard. Maybe an interdimensional portal that ripped the fabric of reality apart. Or, at the very least, Mothra. I never knew that the end would come from…Sheep! Nasty,…

What advantage do I, as an unpublished writer, have over a published author? That might seem like a ludicrous question. Being published is my dream. It is something I devote at least several hours a day to achieving in the not-necessarily-near future. Getting published for the first time is my…

I’m sure most of you all have dropped by Wikipedia at some time or another. This free, collaboratively written encyclopedia is an ongoing project in community intelligence, where anyone with internet access can edit an article on any topic. With a self-regulating system in place, such as editing standards, the…

I believe I’ve mentioned Fantasybookspot.com before, as it is a great resource for book reviews on speculative fiction titles. Check it out again if you haven’t been by there lately. They can help you figure out how to divvy up your book budget each month, plus they seem to get…

A fun announcement to kickoff the weekend. Dragons, Knights, and Angels magazine is holding a short fiction contest. It’s been open a little over a week now, and you can submit an entry until midnight of April 10th. There is both a small entry fee ($5), but a decent set…

What happens if someone steals your story? What if, say, you posted a draft of your story on a critique forum and someday you picked a book off the shelves and started to flip through it. Then you realize you recognize everything but the character names. Someone kidnapped your plot,…

Can you tell a writer’s gender by analyzing their prose? According to the Gender Genie you can. By highlighting masculine and feminine keywords and applying this algorithm to the text, the Gender Genie makes a prediction as to the nature of the one who wrote the sample. Obviously, if you…

We’ve all done it. Grabbed the nearest scrap of paper, tissue, or your girlfriend’s skirt and started scribbling the idea that just hit us before it vanishes into the aether of short-term memory. Then you get home at night, empty your pockets, and realize you can’t read a darn thing…

I enjoy that elusive sense of wonder–that spark of amazement that many of us point to as the reason we started to write speculative fiction in the first place, to share that wonder and inspire it in others. Sometimes, though, this feeling hits from an unexpected source. Like the other…

I’ve always tried to avoid having the quality of my writing be dependant on some foreign substance. There is that lasting writing legacy that some people cling to about alcohol and other vices providing inspiration for stories or some sort of ego and mood booster for the slumping writer. So…