You have something you want to do.

Maybe it’s something you’ve always dreamed of doing. Something interesting and exciting that takes time, effort, and commitment. Something that has nothing to do with your job, or school, or any of the daily obligations that go right along with being a responsible adult. It’s something you want to do even if it’s meaningful only to you.

A passion project is just that. Sometimes it’s just an escape from the inanities of daily life. Sometimes, it evolves into a calling. Above all else, it gives meaning and color to an otherwise ordinary existence…

For most writers, especially those who write speculative fiction get so caught up in the cerebral aspect of creating fantasy worlds that it becomes easy to forget the basic truth of storytelling.

Articulating ideas is highly dependent on one’s ability to affect an individual’s senses and perception with nothing more than words. To do that, we need to be in touch with our own senses and to be able to translate our impressions of the world around us into the written word. …

The news that the State of Texas has effectively outlawed abortions fills me with nothing but a growing sense of dread and horror.

The enactment of this law makes it very clear to me that American society is steadily reverting to those days when women were treated as chattel, denied independence, denied their basic right to exist as sapient beings.

To steer one’s own destiny and to be in complete control of what happens to one’s mind and body are fundamental aspects of being human.

When you take away a person’s right to decide what happens to their own body…

If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you need to take your writing seriously.

That’s the general idea, right?

For a while, I thought that this meant adopting a rigorous approach to my craft. I wanted to be able to write every single day. On a schedule and everything.

I wanted to be able to dutifully read as much as I write. I wanted to be able to write whether I was in the mood or not, whether I was inspired or not. …

Say the only dream you ever had was blue, a cool brilliance that engulfs everything in the universe.

All you know of your place in the monochromatic everything is webbed feet, jewel fingers and a certain unnameable longing. You reach upward and out, straining to grasp the hazy glow of a distant light in your palms.

You begin to swim faster and farther from the deep and dark.

It’s warm near the surface but you don’t know what warmth is. There had never been anyone to teach you that word. It’s a different kind of feeling. It tickles your skin…

Su lives in a futuristic society where the military conscripts gifted children with ability to magically affect technology. These children can do extraordinary things like teleport and materialize weapons at will.

Dubbed clovers, these gifted children are caged and isolated from other humans. The military fears that anyone for whom they develop affection would be able to use them as weapons to destroy the government.

The children are branded with a symbol of the Clover Project. The number of leaves on a child’s brand represents their power level. Su is the most powerful — the only 4-leaf clover ever discovered.

…