All told, 2025 was a pretty good year. Not the best, far from the worst. It was the usual hectic mix of activities and travel, work and writing, and family and friends. Of the latter, the loss of my dear friend Peter David loomed large all year. We got a heads-up just days before he […]
Once again, after slogging through related and unrelated matters, I was able to spend some of last week actually working on the novel outline. I reread the first six chapters, adding details and adjusting certain aspects, and then drafted two more chapters. I also paused to do some further worldbuilding, as I discovered things I […]
After all the time I have written prose and taught story structure and analysis, I would have thought that composing an outline for my first original novel would be pretty straightforward. Instead, I find myself working in fits and starts, trying to find the throughline for the story. I had the inciting incident as the […]
Way, way back in 2020, I was invited by Keith DeCandido and Wrenn Simms to contribute a story to their planned anthology The Four ???? of the Apocalypse. The idea was that the traditional Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Death, Famine, War, and Conquest) could easily be personified not as horsemen but as…septuagenarians, cats, squirrels, […]
I never expected 400 backers and reaching 248% of the goal when I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Thrilling Adventure Yarns in 2019. I just knew I loved the old pulp magazines and wanted to have fun with them, pay tribute to their influence on me as a reader. When the book debuted that summer, […]
Mike Friedman doesn’t think small. He has envisioned worldafter world and one of his most ambitious projects was an alternate history. Some years back, he wondered how mankind would have evolvedhad Pangaea, the super-continent, neve shattered into the seven continents weknow today. He did some research, did some wishful thinking, then invited hisfriends to come […]
I enjoy worldbuilding. It probably has to do with growing up with the words “to seek new life forms and new civilizations…:” rattling in my head with great regularity.I loved playing with the DC Universe characters, helping reshape the universe in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I adored collaborating to craft new worlds […]