2 Mar 2024

Books & Buzz Magazine & Me

posted in: essays, guest posts, writing | 0

Books & Buzz Magazine, in their wisdom, has decided to feature me on their cover this month, with my short essay, “How to Find the Story You Want to Tell.” Lord knows why. I actually titled it, “On Writing, for Those Who Struggle.” Their title is unquestionably better marketing, but I think my title is a little more to the point. No matter. You can read it at https://booksandbuzzmagazine.com/, along with a bunch of other interesting stuff. The magazine is free, so if you’re interested in writing, I encourage you to take a look.

20 Sep 2021

Quiet Inspirations

posted in: essays, writing | 0

This slipped by me when I was busy celebrating my 35th wedding anniversary (yay!) a couple of weeks ago…

It’s an essay I wrote for Readers Entertainment Magazine, called “The Quiet Inspiration for Writing.” Here’s a small snippet:

“No writer works in true isolation. Every conversation a writer has, every book she reads, every job he has ever held, every movie they watch, everyone they’ve fallen in love with, is fodder for the creative process. And most writers, I think, would acknowledge some special influences in their lives, people who touched them early on, encouraging them or maybe trying to discourage them. In my own early life, there were many… [read more]”

You can read the whole thing at https://readersentertainment.com/2021/09/07/the-quiet-inspiration-for-writing-by-jeffrey-a-carver/.

 

24 Jul 2019

My “Big Ideas” in Reefs on Whatever

posted in: essays, guest posts | 0

I should have mentioned this yesterday. For my book launch, John Scalzi graciously offered me a guest spot in the Big Idea feature of his mega-popular blog, Whatever. I wrote about the big ideas inherent in both the writing and the story of Reefs. Here’s the opening…

Big ideas are the meat and potatoes of classical science fiction, but sometimes they collide with one another like bowling balls on a pool table. In The Chaos Chronicles, I have played with some pretty cool cosmic ideas: sentient suns and sentient singularities, supernovas and hypernovas started (or stopped) by the likes of humans and their alien friends, the starstream (a cosmic superhighway for star travel), an enormous Shipworld at the edge of the galaxy serving as refuge for species who have lost their home planets… and in my new book, time travel a billion years into the past, via quantum entanglement. I love this sort of thing! They are part of the driving energy of these books.

But long before I rolled any of that into this story, I had a big idea of a very different sort… read more

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20 Dec 2018

For All Battlestar Galactica Fans

posted in: Battlestar Galactica, books, essays | 0

 

Here’s the perfect book for all fans of the multifaceted Battlestar Galactica! Just published, it’s called Somewhere Beyond the Heavens: Exploring Battlestar Galactica, edited by Rich Handley and  Lou Tambone. It’s a large collection of essays about the series in all its incarnations, from the original (let’s admit it) cheesy show to the far more realistic and thoughtful Sci-Fi Channel’s incarnation from 2003.

As it happens, I contributed an essay on how I experienced the show as the writer of the 2003 Miniseries novelization (which you can download here for free), and my editor wrote the story of the licensing and publishing of books in the BSG universe by Tor Books. It’s only just out, so I haven’t dipped into the other pieces yet, but I look forward to doing so soon.

If you’re looking for a gift for that BSG fan in your life, here it is. In paper and Kindle formats.