There’s no easy way to learn to write. In the end, it’s a butt-in-seat and fingers on the keyboard process that builds skill incrementally and over a long time. This isn’t a bad thing: most things really worth doing are never easy to learn.

But the real problem is trying to figure out when you’re doing it right and when you’re doing it wrong, and that’s where mentoring comes in.

A long time ago, I went to a guitar teacher. He told me I was doing a lot of things wrong — I sat the wrong way, my hands weren’t in the right position, my string-picking was all over the place and my chords were sloppy as hell.

But the real lesson I learned that day was quite different: that in order to progress, one must unlearn bad habits. In terms of writing, it means that with a structured and conscious approach to story construction, character and setting, one can create on paper the kind of worlds readers want to inhabit.

It took me years to unlearn bad habits and figure out the right way to tell a story. During that time I absorbed dozens of books on writing, attended writing workshops, talked to other writers about the art of writing and read hundreds upon hundreds of books and stories in my chosen genres. Slowly, I came to understand the ways in which the writers I admired told their stories, and of how I could learn from them. I put these tools to use when I wrote thirteen books, and it’s these same tools I’ll teach you to apply to your own work.

Now, after years of experience, when I look at a manuscript by a new and unpublished writer I don’t so much see the book as it is _but as it could and should be_. Mentoring, then, means showing you how to see your story from my own perspective, so that you understand what needs to be done to make your work stronger and more appealing. That process can reignite the feelings of excitement and enthusiasm that can sometimes lag in the long, hard push to finish a novel.

I get you there by focusing on time-worn methods of plot construction that are literally as old as writing itself, but without your having to spend the years and decades I myself did in order to reach that destination.

Every writer is different, and every book is different, too. What works for one may not work for another, so the mentoring approach will be tailored to your specific needs. In the process we’ll dig deep into the story and flesh out character motivation and also setting — something that’s particularly important in speculative fiction.