John Morrison

John Morrison is a former intelligence officer and expert in cybersecurity who published his first novel, The Perfection of Fish, in 2020. His manuscript for The Pieces of My Self won the 2023 Claymore Award for Best Sci-fi/Fantasy. The Digital Dreams of Henri Knightly is a work in progress, long-listed for the Yeovil International Literary Prize. He belongs to an astrophysics society and lives near Annapolis, MD, USA.
Hands holding an open book with dozens of pairs of eyes staring back

First Person POV: How Many Are Too Many “I”s?

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You decide to write your story in first-person and run the text through an application such as ProWritingAid or Grammarly. Or maybe you submit it to a weekly critique session. You receive feedback that you have X number of successive “I” references in your story. You fret: “This is first-person! …

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World Building—One Person’s Approach

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So, you’re writing a novel, and the world differs from the one you live in—by a little or a lot. Maybe the story is about the past or the future, or strange people, economics, or technology. There might be magic in the world, or the setting could be on Pluto. …

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The Many Subgenres of Speculative Fiction

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When you’re pitching a speculative fiction story to an agent or publisher, do their eyes sometimes roll back in their heads, and you hear them murmur, “What exactly does that mean?” The term “speculative fiction” says very little about the actual story. And if you try to narrow it to …