The most recent ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS annotation covers the chapter where Alcatraz gets tortured. Check it out.

This week’s Writing Excuses podcast episode features Q&A with James Dashner at Life, the Universe & Everything. We cover the following audience-supplied questions:

• Why is the ARC of James’s first book so different from the later books?
• How do you handle paragraph- and sentence-level edits?
• How do you plot your stories?
• How do you craft endings that are both satisfying, and leave the reader wanting more?
• What do you do when your compelling villain threatens to take over the whole book?

Scott Ashton put up two more lectures from my creative writing class. The first one, Lecture 5, features Nebula Award-winning writer Eric James Stone talking about writing short stories. (I was away at a convention.)

The next one, Lecture 6, covers networking and pitching. Unfortunately there were technical difficulties and the first 20 minutes of the lecture got missed, but the first part of the rest of it is here: