J. Robert King

There are many keys to successful revision. Hemingway is supposed to have advised that you “write drunk, revise sober.” He’s right in that you have to bring a different mind to revising than to writing.
Writing is generative, expansive, excessive, garrulous–even a bit mad. Writing is the Promethean act of stealing fire from the gods.
Revising must be [...]

Writers aren’t supposed to have grit.
Well, writers who aren’t Hemingway or Kerouac or London.
Writers like me, well, we can’t have grit. We don’t even have fiber. We look like risen dough that hasn’t yet been baked.
Still, I’ve written two books in the last eight months while working a full-time job. Most people won’t write one [...]

Human beings have five basic senses, which means that writers who are trying to make readers experience their novels have five basic senses to work with.
But the senses aren’t equal. We weigh them differently.
Seeing is believing. The sense of sight is all about knowing truth, knowing what really happened. “I saw what you did. I’m [...]

I’ve never been a fan of the F-bomb.
It goes back to my roots. Not only was I raised a middle-class evangelical fundamentalist, but also I’m now a member of Plymouth Congregational Church. It’s named after Plymouth Rock. I’m a direct decendent of the Puritans.
But it’s not like I’m unaquainted with the F-bomb, either. When I was [...]

(Image from SawshaW from Flickr)
That’s right, folks–I just sent Death’s Disciples to Marco and Lee at  Angry Robot Books.
Woot!
Now I shift from being a writer–someone who writes–to being an author–someone who has written.
It’s much more comfortable to be an author:

to sign books and shake people’s hands and grin as they snap the picture,
to hang out [...]

Why do 90 percent of new businesses fail?
A news business is a new creation, and according to two of the world’s oldest religions, a new creation requires not one god but three.
Christianity speaks of God the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit, the Sustainer. Hinduism speaks of Brahma the Creator, Shiva the Destroyer [...]

My posts are odd. I know this.
The point of social media is to tell a bit about yourself and invite others to the conversation. Most authors make blog posts that do that.
My posts are more like leering eyes through the food slot in the double-barred door or a flaming bag left on the doorstep.
Why is [...]

Once upon a time, the ancients believed there were the heavens (the atmosphere), the earth (the crust), and hell (the magma). They can be forgiven, because that is as far as their eyes could see.
We can see much farther. We cannot be forgiven for this world view.
That view was geocentric. The earth was in the [...]

I should point out, I’m not an epidemiologist.
(You don’t know how many of my conversations start this way.)
All right, so I’m not an epidemiologist, but I’ve got a new theory about the sneeze. For years, we’ve all been told that the sneeze is the body’s attempt to rid itself of something foreign–to get rid of [...]

Recently, Iran has rounded up dissident journalists and charged them with the crime of being “Agents of the West.”
We fans of Tolkien have to marvel. It is as though the West were Mordor.
But, in a way, Iran is right. What do these journalists seek but to portray a world that is about the rights of the [...]