Most mornings, when pretty much everyone ever is still asleep, I'm shelving in the Sci-Fi / Fantasy section at my job and listening to an audio book on my iPod. It's a new thing for me, listening to the audio book, but it's something I enjoy... Well, something I enjoyed until I decided it would... Continue Reading →
The Hallucinations Will Not Come
It's 7 PM and it's at least 10 degrees hotter in the dining room than it is outside. The dining room, now full of the brain cell-eating tang of very, very strong markers and a cup long emptied of ice water. Louis is ready to start hallucinating. He feels it's the next step after the... Continue Reading →
Fantasy NYC: Lev Grossman signing at Borders at Columbus Circle
From the start, Lev Grossman, the author of The Magicians was disarmingly awkward. Well, not from the start. He eased into it, if such a thing is even possible. But still, it was disarming. I'd spent the previous night absorbing the first 100 pages of Grossman's first fantasy novel and feeling dwarfed by it's prose.... Continue Reading →
The Editing Process
Around when his eyes start to sting and his head begins to throb, Louis realizes he misses the writing process and very much prefers it to the editing process. Fondly, he remembers that the former was like this: -Louis sits down at his computer and rereads the pages he wrote the previous day (or the... Continue Reading →
Character Design: Why Bother?
I was sitting in class at City College once, not taking notes - drawing instead. One of my peers looked over and asked what I was doing. I turned my book so she could see a sketch of one of my favorite main characters. It wasn't enough for her. "Who's that?" I told her and... Continue Reading →
Starting a War
A Different Experience From the beginning, my approach to story telling has been grounded in a desire to give readers something fresh. But I realized early on that different experiences go further for making stories fantastic than different worlds do; a novel set in a world full of dwarves, elves, and orcs gains strength from... Continue Reading →
Inktrap 