Oh, I like this question.

It is unquestionably "lieutenant" because even after a decade of writing I still manage to misspell it nine times out of ten!

The thing to remember with tropes is twofold: They're inevitable and they're just tools. A cliché is really just a trope used poorly, to put things in a very simple context. You can write a thrilling Sci-Fi Epic that is just all the classic tropes we know and love. At the same time, if you want to subvert the tropes with a "But what if—?" (something I like to do) you need to both know them and set them up.

If you attempt to write a story by avoiding all tropes, you'll just end up with a mess. The trick is to understand what the tropes are doing for your story and how to use them as the tools that they are, whether you're playing them straight or subverting them.

No story will be free of tropes, or it won't be a story and instead just a collection of words that don't really make any sense.

But I do enjoy subverting tropes. Sometimes in familiar ways, sometimes not.

I'm glad to hear word is getting out! Tell your friend thanks from me for spreading the word if you get the chance!

I totally understand the desire to be able to listen to books while driving and working (we used to listen to audio books while working back in my commercial fishing days). Unfortunately I don't have great news in that regard: Despite the boom of audiobooks, producing an audiobook isn't cheap, and I have an unfortunate habit of writing absolute tomes. The last I ran the numbers getting an audiobook of Colony made was a cost that was several times my current annual income, and as such it's still out of reach.

I definitely would like to do audiobooks in the future, make no mistake. Starting with Axtara - Banking and Finance. But for the immediate future, it's just not in the budget. I look forward to that day, however!

Timothy Zahn, Brandon Sanderson, RA Salvatore, Howard Tayler, Larry Correia, and Brian McClellan, to name a few.

To discover that, you'll have to read the book!

Hmmm wouldn't a star that's used as a forge be a forgestar?

I had to think about it for a moment, but I'd say no. Both require a lot of research and careful work/planning, and may require that in different areas, but overall I'd say that at least for what I write, neither is easier than the other. Each genre requires its own amount of work, research, study, and careful thought in their own way, but I wouldn't say one is easier or harder than the other. Axtara still had tons of research and study, just like Colony or Jungle did.

Good question.

Actually no. I didn't know it was a crowdfunding disaster until you just said it, and the first I knew that there were other properties that had used the name was when I started promoting Starforge on Twitter. And since the book itself is the finale to a series that I've been working on for eight years, I think it's safe to say there would be zero crossover, and the only similarity would be in the name. Starforge's plot, characters, and setup were all laid down back in 2014 when I began writing Colony, and set in stone when Colony came out in 2016. The journey inside its pages is completely linked to the other two books in the series.

I do recommend giving it a look, especially if you're a fan of huge Sci-Fi adventures. Do recommend starting with the first book in the series, Colony, though. Whether or not you do is entirely up to you!

And hey, maybe you will work on it someday. I'd like the whole trilogy to get an audiobook set. That'd be something like 130 hours all said and done, but it'd be amazing to listen to!

Ooh ... gonna think on this one for a moment. Hmm ... At that point for me it almost becomes "Favorite Non-fiction book" which I'd have to point at a religious text, because I am devoutly Christian.

But I'm fairly sure that's not what you were going for. I'm going to stick with "Non-Fiction" because a lot of what's Sci-Fi and what isn't is kind of nebulous (Jurassic Park for example is definitely Sci-Fi but was not shelved as such by author request).

So I guess I'd have to say something like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, David Willets' The Pinch, or maybe those Horrible Histories books I loved when I was younger.

I will give a special shoutout to Korman's YA books though, since they're technically not fantasy.

Start with some stock. Get it warm, add some frozen veggies and cabbage/potatoes. While those are thawing out and soaking up stock, start cooking up some noodles. Take the cooked noodles and add them to the stock and veggies, season to taste.

A quick, fairly easy lunch if I have all the stuff on hand.

The old method: Submit and pray like mad you get lucky.

Thankfully the market is different now. You can actually "auction" your books if you're a successful indie author these days, getting an agent to contact their people and put forth a starting bid for publishers to compete for. And publishers bite, too, though they hate the cost, because it's one of the ways to keep someone at least "hybrid" publishing instead of going straight indie.

That said if you're brand new and trying to break in, you'll need some sales numbers for them to pay attention, an inside contact (who you know in publishing is far more important that what you write), or just a lot of luck to get your manuscript looked at.

That is a deep question. I usually start with a few simple basics, those being their demeanor, why the audience should like them, what their strengths and weaknesses are (flaws are important), and what their quirks are.

The first is pretty self-explanatory. The second is me asking why readers would want to read about the character. Are they funny? Clever? Kind? What draws them in? Something unique? Something strange?

Strengths and weaknesses is pretty straightforward. Quirks though, these are the little idiosyncrasies that everyone has. They can be nervous twitches, a love of a certain food, a dislike of a certain food, a hobby, a habit. Little things that everyone has that are easy to forget about (and many times we don't even recognize them in ourselves).

Wrap that up with some goals, and usually it's enough to start. Above all else, the most important thing is to me is to let the character breathe and be a living-individual. I don't have control over where they go or what they do. They do. I just control the sets. Authors like to joke that their characters are the "voices in their head" and in a way they're not wrong!

EDIT: As you might imagine, there are dozens of posts about this on my site.

Easy answer: Timothy Zahn's The Icarus Hunt!

Naturally, I do encourage checking out my own books as well. ;)

My tip-of-the-tongue answer is Star Wars. Specifically Return of the Jedi. I know, I know, most people prefer The Empire Strikes Back, but I love fleet engagements, and that final fleet battle in RotJ is one of my favorite cinema moments of all time. I love fleet battles in general—big and small—which is why I also why I was so thrilled to have several ship to ship battles in Starforge.

However, my answer would not be complete without noting two other films that I absolutely have a soft place in my heart for, one which is very much Sci-Fi and one which really isn't but I'll list it anyway. The first is Predator. Yup, with Schwarzenegger. I love the way that movie upends its tropes, and the Predator itself is just an amazing design.

The other movie isn't really a Sci-Fi, but it is the perfect film. I speak, of course, of the Kevin Bacon film Tremors.

Now series ... that's a tough one. There are a lot of Sci-Fi series out there, some of which are very good, and it's hard to pick just one. But I'm going to go for an odd shot and say that while I'll love Star Trek for its approach and Star Wars shows for theirs, and I love Firefly ... I'd have to say that all of those, I feel, owe the original Twilight Zone. It's Sci-Fi—sometimes fantasy—that asked tough questions or posited moral conundrums often without an answer.

Picking a favorite is nigh impossible, but I do have a place in my heart for The Twilight Zone and its approach to making us think about ourselves.

Nope. None. Never played it. As to what the Starforge is, you'll have to read the book to find out!

Thanks for swinging by! In answer to your questions:

1. I actually don't worry myself with "What if someone else has written something similar" because every story is going to be very different in the execution. For example, a story about an orphaned boy being grabbed away from his aunt and uncle to learn magic and discover that he's a VIP ... is that Star Wars or Harry Potter? Or is it both, but each executed very differently?

I've actually written a whole post about this concept on my site, but the crux of it is "Don't worry, just write your story. Now, if you reach the end and you realize you've rewritten your favorite story, then you may need to exercise your creative muscles and imagination a bit and actively work to try and do things that are outside your wheelhouse.

As for me though, one thing my readers have made most clear is that my stuff is quite unique, since I tend to run outside the box looking for fun ideas like "Dragon decides to become a banker instead of kidnapping princesses."

The short of it is not to worry about it. The moment your characters take over, your story will be its own thing.

2. Publishing is a serious gamble. It's literally, unless you have an industry inside contact—and even then that might not help—the equivalent of buying a powerball ticket.

Between that and the rapidly dropping royalties publishers pay these days is why so many authors choose to go indie or adopt the hybrid model. I myself went indie. I like the greater royalty cut and the control to write what I want instead of being stuck under a contract to "Marketing says this book will sell this year, so that's what you're writing."

There are still good publishers out there, but I like the indie side of things.

Start to finish! Sometimes I dream up an ending first, but I don't start writing until I've got the beginning and middle at least mostly figured out.

It pays ... not a lot, though I'm better off as an Indie Author thanks to the much better royalty rate. 80% of authors have a second job (last I checked the census, anyway), and I've bounced in and out of that over the years. I write full-time, and it pays for a good chunk of my expenses, but I still have had to do some work on the side outside of that for the last two years. There was a brief moment where it was all I needed ... and then the economic death of the last two years hit.

That said, each release I have moves my monthly income up another few notches and brings me to a wider audience. I've got people buying books all over the world now, with sales in Brazil, Germany, and Denmark (Axtara has been a real hit in other countries). It's a slow but steady process, but most authors who "make it" don't make enough to live off of for the first decade or so.

EDIT: I got time, so I'll run some math by you. Starforge, my newest book (the one that comes out tomorrow) is selling at $9.99. Which seems like a lot, but then my rate for the royalty is 70%. Which is really high, because I'm an indie author (a trad pub would be a lot less, in the realm of 15% if you're a rock-star to less than 5% if you're a nobody).

But for ease let's say I make $7 on each copy sold. So in order to make a minimum wage of $15 an hour, I'll need to sell more than three books an hour for eight hours. Let's chop a few sales off at the end of the day to account for rounding with our quick and dirty math, but that's still 18 copies in a day to make a minimum wage.

Now, I do have other books, but being older they're priced lower. Colony will be, once I do my inflation price adjustment (it's been a decade since I changed prices) $4.99. Roughly $3.50 per copy sold. So to make a day's minimum wage that's 36 copies sold in a day.

But printed books take things a step further. The bookstore wants their cut, which is usually about 50% of the cover price. In order to keep Axtara's paperback at $12, there are some markets where a sale of that $12 paperback only nets me about seven cents. Imagine how many copies I'd have to sell then to make a day's minimum wage. Since publishers want their share before the author, this is why that $45 hardback you just bought paid the author a dime (if they were lucky).

Point being, a lot of authors don't get paid a lot, and you need a lot of sales to make things work. I've been clawing my way up for ten years now, to the point that I make more in a month than I used to make in a whole year, but there's still plenty of room to grow.

Very chaotic. I frequently refer to it as an absolute storm of an industry as everything either gets upended or is trying not to be upended. Publishing managed to put off the changes brought about by the internet era for as long as possible, but they couldn't hold it back for every and now everything's crazy.

Trad-pub still exists, the ol' "I'll send a manuscript to every publisher in existence and hope someone bites." But the royalties are a fraction of what they once were, and you give up a lot of control in exchange for less with each passing year (it used to be that if there were signings or promotionals the publisher would pay for them, now it's the author most of the time).

Hybrid-Publishing is rapidly becoming the new force, with authors "double-dipping" into being both indie and traditional. They'll make the trad-pubs bid on upcoming books, or sign a contract that lets the publisher get one book for every 2-3 that the author releases on their own. Publishers don't like this, but it's better than being left out in the cold. Many people would also be surprised how many "big name" authors have switched to this model.

Lastly you've got full indie publishing, like myself. No deals with any traditional publishing house, and selling books either directly or through a traditional middleman without the publisher.

I've written a few pieces about it on my site. Trad pub also spends a lot of money getting pieces written about how the sky isn't falling, ebooks are a fad, or indie publishing will never work for anyone even as they shell out millions of dollars for the rights to publish paperback copies of The Martian, because they don't want the boat rocking.

It's far from over, but seeing as we've gone from the "Big six" traditional publishers down to the 'Big four" and one of the green rooms I've hung out in had a bunch of authors making bets on which would be the next to fall, there's still some shakeup coming.