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

2013: A Year of Books and—what!?—Non-fiction?

I’m not much for resolutions, but it is nice to reflect upon the past year in order to recalibrate your goals going forward, so here’s my 2013 year in review. It was a big year for me, one in which I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks and learned a lot about the business of being a writer.

Dreamwielder

The publication of my debut, standalone fantasy novel was the big story for me in 2013(and a huge step forward in my career). After much deliberation with my agent about the wisdom of signing with an e-book first publisher, we inked a deal with Diversion Books at the end of 2012, and it paid off. The first couple of months in 2013 were devoted to working with my editor at Diversion to get the book ready for publication. The book was released in e-book format on March 5 and was promptly picked up as a Nook First selection at BarnesAndNoble.com. In May, the audiobook version was released by Audible.com. To date, while not setting the fantasy world on fire, the book has sold well and garnered positive reviews, including these two here and here, although I did get this puzzlingly mediocre review in Tales of the Talisman. If I continue to post improving sales numbers, we’ll hopefully be able to offer the book in print.

The Man Behind the Podcasts: Patrick Hester

If you hang out in the online SFF community much, you’ve likely run across Patrick Hester before. The guy is nutty busy. He blogs, tweets, writes a column on graphic novels for Kirkus Reviews, and runs three podcasts, the most notable being the SF Signal podcast, which has been nominated for a Parsec award and twice nominated for a Hugo Award. In addition to all that, Patrick is an emerging SFF author himself, and—oh yeah—he works a full-time day job! I had the great pleasure of interviewing Patrick for a new article I wrote at Blackgate, but since I could only use a small portion of our conversation and Patrick had so many great things to say, I decided to run with the full interview transcript here. Enjoy!

GC: Welcome, Patrick! Could you please describe your writing career up to this point in a nutshell.

In a nutshell, I got serious about writing in 2000 and spent the rest of the decade trying to write something I felt was worthy of publishing. I'm pretty obsessive about that part and didn't begin shopping a novel series and selling short stories until 2009. I now have a couple short stories out in anthologies, and have pushed some other stuff out myself as part of a hybrid/indie model I've been developing for myself. Still trying to sell the novels, though.

GC: How do you make ends meet?

I stand on street corners with a sign that reads: "Will write for money."

Kidding… I only do that at conventions. The rest of the time,