Untold Tales

Writer/Reader/Listener Blog

March 25, 2024

Indie or Traditionally Published – and why?

From time to time you hear authors being asked why they chose to self-publish. Preferring to maintain creative control is the most common answer. But what does this really mean, creative control? Talking to the Galaxy of Authors webpage, the author…

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March 18, 2024

POV and TENSE

One of the most important choices that a writer makes when they start a story is the “point-of-view”, or POV, that will be used. Most stories are told in a 3rd person POV and usually in the past tense. These include stories that start w…

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March 11, 2024

One Basic Plot

            I was offered the opportunity to teach a group of junior high school students. This was obviously an ad hoc proposition linking me-as-a-writer to them-as-bored-kids, the product of e…

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March 4, 2024

Science Fiction - Nineteenth-Century Technology and Society - Part 2

As mentioned in the last blog, advances in science and technology had a profound influence on writing in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. As new branches of  physics, chemistry and medicine grew, so did the opportunities …

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Feb. 26, 2024

Science Fiction - Nineteenth-Century Technology and Society

The nineteenth century was a time of great change and upheaval. It was also a period of great adventure and opportunity. Advances in science and technology induced much of this change and had widespread effects on society. In our generation, we've …

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Feb. 15, 2024

Why Everyone Should Read Science Fiction

Bold title. “Everyone”? Yes, everyone. You’ll see why soon, depending on your reading speed and my ability to keep your interest. The call for everyone to read science fiction boils down to three reasons. The first is that reading…

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Feb. 6, 2024

When Science Invaded Fiction

Most people think of science fiction as a twentieth century phenomenon, born in the age of atomic energy, the ‘bomb’, and the race for the moon.  It may surprise many to find that science fiction traces its roots much further back a…

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Jan. 30, 2024

The Seven Deadly Sins of Writing

Many people oppose the concept of hard 'rules' about writing and argue adamantly against blanket do's and don'ts. As Marc Neuffer (one of our favorite contributors) recently said... "Rules often become truncated sound bites, their original, e…

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Jan. 23, 2024

SF Songs -Stardrive

In earlier blogs, we shared with you some science fiction poetry that dated back to the 1880’s. For this blog post, I would like to share a science fiction SONG. It was quite popular during the late 20th century and was played at almost ever…

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Jan. 16, 2024

WHERE DO YOU LISTEN

One of the main reasons that we created Untold Tales Audio Anthology was because it simply takes too long to listen to full audio books and, while we love quality science fiction, it is often impossible to an entire novel in a single sitting.(A typi…

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