As a kid, what enticed me to become an author was the way fiction could sweep me into other places. Through reading I could experience through words what I could not experience in real life; I could even become other people. It was sorcery.

However, words were imperfect. Reading could only transfer experiences to me if I had some personal frame of reference for them. As an adolescent I had trouble relating to books with military settings, for example. They were so far removed from my experience, I struggled to create a vivid picture of them in my mind.

I was painfully aware of how my patchy store of personal experiences could limit me in writing. I scrounged for anything that I could use to make up for the gaps, so as a sheltered adolescent, I seized upon one of the most reviled technologies of the age as a way to broaden the scope of my experience for my writing: video games.

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I.

Pain was almost a myth to him, something he could no more fathom than he could see an atom. He had never felt the stinging, stabbing, burning, or aching that could come from courting danger.

He only knew how the dogs of his neighborhood whimpered when injured, but he could not imagine what was going on inside of them. His siblings could not imagine it either, but unlike them Brand loved being alive, loved it enough to keep on living.

He had known moments of heightened awake-ness when the world had leapt into full color. He had enjoyed the tangy sweetness of a ripe strawberry, the contemplative view of a night sky, and the wonder of his shimmering reflection in a pond. He enjoyed chopping firewood, the blunt sound of impact, he loved shivering in the cozy warmth of a fireplace on a cool night, and he liked to write about them in his journal, how they sounded, how they felt, how they smelled.

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When I write a rough draft of a story or novel, I am constantly looking for its pulse, the raw energy of a story, the point of transition in which the story takes on a life of its own and seems almost to write itself.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with writing rough drafts that lag. I write them all the time because I have to start somewhere. In fact, sometimes my story does not come to life for me until after I have written my self-conscious, plodding. uninspired rough draft. But after having been through the process many times, I have learned some things about making dead prose stir to life.

In fiction, a problem that I have grappled with, which can be solved early on, is the strength of character motive.

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Exciting news: My novel The Ghosts of Chimera, which I began to write over ten years ago, is now available on Amazon for electronic purchase.

It is 558 pages, but I have reread it dozens of times, and it has never seemed that long to me, to the point that I have at times questioned the veracity of my computer.

The novel was accepted by a traditional publisher a couple of years ago, but my experience was not good. I strongly disagreed with the content edits and backed out of the deal. I would have done any amount of work, gone to most any length, to make changes if I had believed they would strengthen the novel, but I refused to make any changes that I thought would weaken it.

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I have written all my life, but it was only in college that I discovered the thesis statement. My professors prized them highly, selling them as magic wands of clarity to wave over fuzzy prose. There was nothing like a thesis statement to unravel tangled thinking. Every essay, they insisted, should have one, to be worthy in their eyes.

A thesis statement meant taking responsibility for all that I said. I had to say in the first paragraph what I wanted to prove, such as “Little Red Riding Hood is Gullible,” then I had to back up my general claim; I had to prove it, preferably again and again, using as many supporting details as possible.

I was a skeptic, and I was all for thinking clearly. I even became a writing tutor who explained how to write, and develop, thesis statements. As a student, and nerd, I could not have respected them more.

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I.
The boy coughed. He knew he was dying. He had watched many other children die before him, suffocate over a period of months even as they breathed. With each new day, the synthetic  air seemed to feel grittier, heavier. But he was only nine. He could not let himself die yet, not if he could help it.

He had dreams. Lately he had been dreaming of a place he could call home, a place of rolling waves on starlit seas and dreamy, iridescent mountains made of ice. He had never seen the lost home his father had described, a casualty of a dying sun that had sent them space borne.

Aerrie had often asked his father about the lost world. His father had said his home had been far more than its physical features; it had been governed by something called principles, which was the only part of his home planet the natives had been able to carry with them. Unfortunately, Aerrie could not feel or see principles like water, snow, or sand.

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I once had a college professor who derided video games as the curse of the century and a deplorable waste of time.

Maybe he would have been surprised to know that playing video games inspired me to write all three of my novels.

The games may have appeared silly and inconsequential, yet they engaged my imagination. My creative impulse could not resist a colorful virtual playground.

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Sometimes I decide, “I would rather not do real life today. I would rather write instead.”

And sometimes someone has the audacity to pull me away from my writing and pressure me into doing something “real” like going shopping. Lucky for me, even when the saboteur manages to persuade me into buying groceries instead of penning my next masterpiece, I have a super-secret, sneaky way to rebel.

Little does he know that just because I’m not at my computer, that doesn’t mean I’m not writing. Every snarky cashier I meet becomes a potential character model for a story.  The lady who snatches the last carton of my favorite peach ice cream in a supermarket? Villain fodder! “Better enjoy that ice cream, missy. I have disparagingly described your facial contours, style of dress, and gestural habits on the notepad of my phone. However I have noted one good trait so you will be believable. I will see you in my novel!”

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I knew America was in serious trouble the day an NPR journalist praised Republican Senator John McCain as being a “profile in courage” just for suggesting that a free press might be a good thing.

McCain had contradicted the president, who had tweeted that the press was the “enemy of the American people.” McCain argued that silencing the press was how dictators got started.

I thought, wow, the bar has never been lower for any Congressional Republican who might seek the legendary status of an American hero. All one had to do is acknowledge the truth, to say what most every U.S. history student learns in public schools: that a free press is a basic feature that supports democracy.

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