In our ongoing series A Word with Spec Fic Writers, we sat down with newcomer Matthew Cushing. Mr. Cushing’s passion for writing fiction started in junior high school when he started adding elements of mystery and action to classroom assignments. Short stories soon followed, and he’s been writing speculative fiction ever since. He grew up in the scientific and outdoorsy culture of Los Alamos, New Mexico, which ingrained in him …
Welcome to A Word With Spec Fic Writers. This week, SFW interviews SciFi author R. C. Beckett. R. C. is a retired MD who has always loved science fiction and a good joke. He made his first website by hand-coding HTML. It was so long ago the scrolls have been lost, and now he volunteers with several non-profit companies as a webmaster. An avid medical blogger, he started writing science …
Welcome to A Word With Spec Fic Writers. This week, we’re happy to interview Linda Ditchkus, who publishes under the pen name LV Ditchkus. L.V. DITCHKUS is the author of The Sasquatch Series: Book I – Crimes of the Sasquatch, Book II – Mission of the Sasquatch, and Book III – Legacy of the Sasquatch. Watch for Book IV – Passage of the Sasquatch, which will be released in 2021. …
Writing advice surrounds me. Everyone, it seems, is an expert. One day, all that information on self-publishing, pitching a story, and writing query letters will come in handy, but for now I feel like I’m drowning in unhelpful advice. Sink with me to the bottom of the writing-advice ocean, where I talk with Mark Stevens, author and host of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers (RMFW) Podcast. Why would Mark bother …
Welcome to our first installment of A Word with Spec Fic Writers, a series of interviews with Spec Fic Writers’ members. This week, we spotlight Paul Martz, a member of Spec Fic Writers Critique Group since 2018. Paul is a new writer, a retired computer programmer, and a former punk rock drummer. He has published two short stories. Jimmy’s Hat appears in the First Encounters anthology, and The Re-Creation of …
To all our fellow writers out there, especially the unpublished ones, our group wanted to share a few lessons learned about hiring a book cover designer for our First Encounters anthology. Paul Martz and I reached out to Mark Stevens, author and host of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers (RMFW) Podcast, as a means of getting the word out, and below is our discussion on the topic. We shared some …
Short stories are fun to read because they pack an unexpected emotional punch. However, “short” does not mean easy to write, or a formless type of expression. Quite the contrary, they are written and rewritten numerous times with herculean effort to be efficient, banish loose ends, conclude with a plot twist plus a memorable last line. The big picture of a small story The plot follows the shape of a …
The Speculative Fiction Writers, a Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers online critique group, has published its first anthology, a collection of ten original stories by its members. Authors represent a variety of sub-genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopian, and more. First Encounters: A Speculative Fiction Anthology is currently available at Amazon in eBook and paperback. First encounters. We wait for, dread, or stumble upon them. The unknown calls forth exciting …
Paul Martz’s science fiction short story, The re-creation of Sahmik Ghee, will appear in the 2020 RMFW Anthology, Wild: Uncivilized Tales, available September 11. The story was inspired by the classic poem by Robert W. Service and reflects Paul’s love for both kaiju and dark humor. This will be Paul’s first published work of fiction. On a planet where deadly snow elementals roam the frozen poles, two traders embark on …
