Well, that was a surprise. Last night I was organizing some of my writing folders in preparation for focusing on my fantasy novel when I stumbled upon my file of short story ideas in Evernote. One of the story ideas was a tale written within the structure of a list of prose terms, such as “paragraph,” “metaphor,” and “flashback.” I had a vague idea how I wanted to use them, and the concept was intriguing to me, so I started …

I entered 2011 as a total newcomer to published fiction. I had spent the bulk of my professional life writing articles and columns in the music and tech industry. For a few years before 2011 I had dabbled in fiction but didn’t approach it with any level of seriousness. So 2011 was basically my initiation into the world of professional fiction. Despite my being thoroughly new to the science fiction and fantasy genres (I hadn’t followed them to any significant …