Her Night Off
Reading Time: 4 minutes After a chance encounter and a night of passion in Manhattan, a woman must choose between her responsibility and her heart.
Reading Time: 4 minutes After a chance encounter and a night of passion in Manhattan, a woman must choose between her responsibility and her heart.
Reading Time: 8 minutes If you find your book vision is more of a hazy, amorphous blob than a fully thought out story, it may be time to get back to basics to find gaps to fill.
Writing Advice of the Week: See Your Book Take Shape Read More »
Reading Time: 9 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list is chock full of romantic fantasy!
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Dec. 29, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 12 minutes In a Victorian town plagued by werespiders, a curious spinster takes in a mysterious woman.
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Sorry it’s not sunny.” Amar shrugs. “Rainy days are the best for time travel.”
Reading Time: 5 minutes A young girl, determined to catch Santa in the act, waits impatiently with a list of her own.
Reading Time: 11 minutes This time of year, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and overloaded. For all the “most wonderful time” soundbites, it’s often the most stressful time of year for many. Get insight into how skill-stacking and focus can help you maintain your progress through the holidays and beyond.
Writing Advice of the Week: Set Goals to Stay Focused Read More »
Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes two epic fantasies and radio signals from an alien civilization.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Dec. 22, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 3 minutes Talabi’s collection showcases the interplay of family, culture, queer identity, and speculative futures in fifteen fantastic short stories and one novella.
Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi provides a feast of short stories Read More »
Reading Time: 5 minutes Seven stories of holiday magic — and horror — from MetaStellar’s best speculative fiction authors.
Reading Time: 4 minutes The town of Boyerville is covered in smoke from a nearby fire. Officially, the fire was started by accident, but the townspeople suspect otherwise.
Reading Time: 5 minutes The real crook is the Company and always has been. It’s them that got reaction drives outlawed when water’s free, dammit. They only done it so we’d have to buy fusion fuel at a thousand percent markup. Most of us so-called pirates were just freelance miners that couldn’t afford the new engines.
Reading Time: 13 minutes A mother and her young daughter fight to survive in a world ravaged by an ongoing world war between megacorporations.
Reading Time: 12 minutes Novel excerpt: Veronica is eternally fifty-one years old with a proclivity for problematic drinking. Like most hormonally-challenged women negotiating the change of life, she is a hot mess. To retain her sanity, she attends weekly AA meetings and adheres to a strict diet of organic, locally-sourced, (mostly) cruelty-free human blood from the hospice facility where she works.
Reading Time: 9 minutes Focusing all your energy on what the reader wants or needs is exhausting. And while you’re writing, it’s often not worth the effort. You simply cannot know exactly how another person will perceive your story. But there’s one thing you can know with absolute certainty: Do you, author, like your book?
Writing Advice of the Week: Storytellers Write For Themselves Read More »
Reading Time: 11 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes two Christmas stories, a time travel romance, and a techno-thriller about human brain augmentation from a New York Times bestselling author.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Dec. 15, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 3 minutes A great read involving factionalized parasitic aliens, a morally grey protagonist, and a harrowing rescue mission.
Wishes are Like Curses in The Quelling by C. L. Lauder Read More »
Reading Time: 3 minutes She has plenty of matchsticks at home and she is clever with crafts. She really thinks they should be more expensive—matchsticks—considering how versatile and sturdy they are. She’s thinking of the fine wooden ones with fire-red tips. This is not the first time, of course. She must be half matchsticks by now.
Reading Time: 17 minutes Dorian Salva is an artist with a consuming passion for birds. One night, his work-in-progress takes on an eerie life of its own, and the relationship between artist and subject, painter and painted, undergoes an uncanny reversal.
Reading Time: 9 minutes If December brings about reflection in you, you, too, may be undergoing profound change as you decide what you want out of your life and how best to go ahead and get it. While undergoing fundamental changes in who we are is a part of many creative professional pursuits, the change process itself can come with its own set of gifts to help us get through the tumult of change.
Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes three stories of sexy aliens, an alien invasion, and a young adult paranormal romance by a USA Today bestselling author.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Dec. 8, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 5 minutes A fractured fable and a meal served up in a haunted castle.
Reading Time: 2 minutes This has to be the year the bodies crest the top of the structure, because her parents are selling the cabin. They keep saying, It’s changed, it’s changed, it’s not the same. Even when she says she doesn’t care how it used to be, that she likes it now.
Reading Time: 17 minutes A woman tries to intervene with the fate of a young barista, but fate will not be cheated.
Reading Time: 9 minutes An ambition to write or edit a book without clear and quantifiable goals and a path to achieve those goals — whatever that looks like for each of us — is just a wish. And wishes don’t write drafts. Getting back on track doesn’t need to come with a headache, though.
Writing Advice of the Week: Make Sense of the Self-Edit Read More »
Reading Time: 9 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list features USA Today bestselling authors, a vampire cop, Death trying to figure out why it’s now alive, and a mafia boss trying to save his family in the aftermath of an EMP attack.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Dec. 1, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 4 minutes When a mysterious letter written in strange disappearing ink arrives from the daughter he banished long ago for dabbling in sorcery, a father must decipher her cryptic confession before the words and his memories fade into oblivion.
Reading Time: 31 minutes An anxious young man gets more than he bargained for when he accompanies his fiance’s family on a hunting trip.
Reading Time: 8 minutes If you find yourself spinning your writerly wheels without gaining traction, it may be time to step back from the project at hand. But this doesn’t mean you stop writing. Instead, it’s time to learn about storytelling, content structure, or other aspects of writing from life itself.
Writing Advice of the Week: Get Consistent to Boost Creativity Read More »
Reading Time: 8 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a space opera box set from a USA Today bestselling author, as well as sci-fi and fantasy romance and an epic fantasy box set.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Nov. 24, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 4 minutes Here we have an unexpected intersection of past and present when Fate takes a hand to things up.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Science fiction meets gothic in this story of a groundbreaking discovery gone wrong, and the horrifying fall of the titular scientist.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Anthropic’s Claude can now read texts up to 150,000 words in length, double its previous limit — and its accuracy is now better, as well.
Reading Time: 17 minutes When Irish-born Father Donahey retires to Winterset, he finds the community is awash with supernatural creatures, some friendly, many decidedly not.
Reading Time: 7 minutes We’re just over halfway through National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and if you’re anything like the authors with whom I work, you may be hitting that mid-novel slump. And getting beyond the slump becomes the primary goal. So, how do you keep writing when the writing is hard?
Writing Advice of the Week: Intention Goes A Long Way Read More »
Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a rebellion against a magic-wielding space empire, a magic-filled holiday romance, and an alien princess trying to figure out her identity.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Nov. 17, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 4 minutes A flash fantasy story about a High Priestess who must deal with rising tides that threaten to drown her people.
Reading Time: 21 minutes Ben is reveling in his tragically achieved freedom. He thinks he has it made, except for an elusive partner. Then an unknown woman first DMs then stands him up. His troubles have only begun when he realizes how thoroughly someone has infiltrated his technological fortress.
Reading Time: 4 minutes One of the most common bits of advice given to authors is to humanize their characters. Give them flaws. Dreams. Fears. Desires. Yada, yada, yada. But if you’ve filled out character profile sheets, you know how little value this piece of advice actually provides.
Writing Advice of the Week: Characters Are People Too Read More »
Reading Time: 5 minutes We subscribe to more than 180 writing advice sites and gather the best posts for you every single Sunday. This week there’s plenty of advice about staying motivated through NaNoWriMo.
This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Nov. 12, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes an ass-kicking, magic-wielding assassin, a Cinderella who goes to a vampire’s ball, and a sexy gargoyle.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Nov. 10, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 3 minutes In this spooky flash story, a woman haunts her own house after a messy breakup.
Reading Time: 15 minutes In the aftermath of a climate apocalypse, Jeremy and Alex survive by supplying food to the wealthy people living above the water, in the penthouses of Old Manhattan. But the wealthy aren’t the only ones that are hungry.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Whether it’s imposter syndrome that has you down, the stress of balancing writing against all the other things we do each day, feeling a lack of inspiration, or something else, I want to help you get out of your own way so you can complete your story and gain that coveted sense of achievement of having crossed off “write a book” from your bucket list.
Writing Advice of the Week: Get Out of Your Own Way Read More »
Reading Time: 6 minutes We subscribe to more than 180 writing advice sites and YouTube channels and lovingly pick the best posts from this previous week for your edification. This week, we’ve got 96 articles, podcasts and videos about motivation, writing, and business and marketing for authors.
This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Nov. 5, 2023 Read More »
Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a Cinderella romance, a bounty hunter in a dead city, and the first magical Christmas mystery of the season.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Nov. 3, 2023 Read More »