I confess, I haven’t written a book on spec in decades.

I’m not familiar with that usage either, but I’m from Seattle, which is about as far from the South as you can get, short of Alaska.

I was a secular enough kid that my first exposure to the concept of Holy Communion came from reading DRACULA in sixth grade. My dad had to explain to me why Van Helsing was sprinkling wafers into Dracula’s coffin. I know about the crosses and holy water from the movies, of course, but communion wafers were unknown to…

Sometimes it’s easier than resorting to italics. :)

Nope. I got that number wrong. Turns out there are indeed only twenty-five or so.

I enjoyed the movies as their own thing, kinda of like the way I love the old Universal FRANKENSTEIN movies, even though they bear next to no resemblance to the novel.

I confess, I pulled that number out of my ass rather than take the time to look up the actual number. I just remembered that were a lot of them. I also read Lupoff’s EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS: MASTER OF ADVENTURE book to pieces, as well as Farmer’s TARZAN ALIVE!

I read a fair number of the TARZAN novels, but not all forty-plus of them. But I also devoured pretty much all of ERB’s science fiction books and series: Mars, Venus, Pellucidar, The Land That Forgot, The Moon Maid, The Monster Men, etc.

And, of course, the movies were a staple of my childhood as well, from the old…

Tell me about it. I loved TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE as a kid.

My grandfather actually had a couple of beaten-up old hardcovers of the Burroughs’ novels which he gave to me long, long ago. TARZAN, LORD OF THE JUNGLE and TARZAN THE INVINCIBLE, as I recall.

Exactly. He starts out as a wild man in the book, but eventually acquires “civilized” speech patterns and manners. By the end of the first novel, he speaks both English AND French fluently.

It’s only in the old Weissmuller movies that he stays stuck in the “Me, Tarzan. You, Jane” mode.

Loved the moment where they hear…

In the novel, she was American. She just marries an English lord, who happened to be raised by apes.

Good ep. Funny how such an overtly comic premise (Liv becomes a superhero!) led to such a genuinely sad episode.

Honestly, the only time it didn’t work for me was when I writing CSI novels, which are not terribly character-driven. Terry’s Rule didn’t really apply when it came to examining a key piece of fiber evidence. :)

Most authors need day jobs, especially in the early days. I didn’t quit my day job until I’d sold at least six novels—and had at least a year’s worth of income under contract.

And I still supplement my writing income by doing plenty of freelance editing and copywriting.

I’m not a hundred-percent sure, but that Wolf Lady illo is for DARKER THAN YOU THINK by Jack Williamson, right? That cover art looks familiar.

More advice, from the late Terry Carr. Nine times out of ten, the POV character should be the character under the most stress, physically or emotionally. I still think of this as “Terry’s Rule” and it has seldom led me astray. (The one notable exception is when you CAN’T go into a character’s head without revealing…

I still remember one of my Clarion West instructors, Suzy McKee Charnas, teaching us something similar back in the day: If you’re really struggling with a scene and it feels like pulling teeth, maybe you need to rethink that scene and try something else. I’ve found that sometimes just switching the POV character can…

“Home” is still my favorite episode.

Yes, I’m a sick person . ...

Seriously, I always preferred the MoW episodes to the increasingly byzantine “Conspiracy” arc episodes, and find that they hold up much better when it comes to re-watching.

This is where I can’t resisting mentioning that there are still X-FILES books and comics coming out as well. And, say, I just happen to have a story in the next X-FILES anthology, coming out in March . . ..

She doesn’t even need to a ruler, actually. It wasn’t just the pharoahs who got mummified back in the day. The rulers just got the bigger and more elaborate tombs, but even scribes and priestesses and cats and dogs got mummified.