Celebrating Seven Years: Best of The Machine Stops

Saying goodbye to the old Machine Stops logo

August 8, 2016 was the seven-year anniversary for this blog, and I finally got around to giving the site a facelift. Hopefully, the new layout will make reading easier on they eyes. I'm also going through and updating broken links, including making sure all the book titles and images now have active links.

The Machine Stops started out with me intermittently rambling on about what I was working on in the infancy of my writing career, but as I became more involved in the SF/F community as a professional (sometime around 2011), the blog become infinitely more interesting, featuring interviews with other authors and the occasional SF/F lists.

Looking forward, I'll still be blogging about my own writing updates (about once a month), but you can expect to see a lot more interviews with other authors and fun features like top-10 lists and whatever other strange ideas pop into my head.

To celebrate the first seven years and kickoff a new chapter for The Machine Stops, here are the

Top 10 Most Popular SF/F Posts

Interview: Fantasy Author David B. Coe Talks the Writing Life

David B. Coe is a fantasy author I’ve been following for several years now over at the very cool website MagicalWords.net. His novels have never been on the New York Times Bestseller list. No one’s ever written him a million dollar check to turn one of his books into a Hollywood blockbuster. And yet he’s been steadily publishing fantasy novels with Tor Books for sixteen years, including a new series of historical urban fantasy novels under the pseudonym D.B. Jackson. His forthright articles at Magical Words illustrate what a consummate pro he is—always striving to improve his craft, and writing for the love of storytelling, not fame and fortune. Not that he or I or dozens of other fantasy authors wouldn’t relish fame and fortune, but that’s the point: most published authors don’t get stinking rich from their books.

Coe’s writing advice at Magical Words, along with conversations I’ve had with steampunk pioneers James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers (similarly, successful pros who aren’t rich!), and my own personal experiences struggling to make a living as a writer, all served as inspiration for the new article I wrote over at Blackgate magazine. Coe was kind enough to agree to being interviewed for the article, and since I was only able to use a small portion of my conversation with him, I’m happy to present the entire transcript here at my personal blog.



David, welcome, and thanks for your time. You received a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1993 and your first novel, Children of Amarid, came out in 1997. Can you describe your journey going from graduate student to published author to full-time author?