by George Polley

Reading and Writing

I grew up surrounded by books. My parents were avid readers I’ve been an avid reader since childhood, especially adventure, humor and historical fiction. My mother had a whole shelf of historical novels by Louise Muhlbach (Born: Jan. 2, 1814 - Neubrandenburg, Germany, Died: Sep. 26, 1873 - Berlin) that I devoured. Grand novels about Frederick the Great of Prussia, Napoleon and Josephine, the Austrian Imperial Court, Henry VIII that I’ve never forgott...

Talk about time consuming. Admittedly, it was almost fifteen years worth of research and notes, or, rather, research and notes that had survived several com...

I’ve been submerging myself into Wayfarer, which should be a good thing, and following some of Orson Scott Card’s advice on writing fantasy [from his book, 'How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy', from Writer's Digest Books]. I’ve been going back over the system of occult science I developed for my milieu, collating the various notes to make one comprehensive document; an “Introduction to the Occult Sciences”, written as by an historical figure from my milieu. That has been provi...

I spent most of the last several days putting my notes in order. It took that long because there were ten-year's worth of them—amounting to a little over a million words. Not surprisingly, sorting them has helped me to sort myself. This last week has seen the resumption of the flow of creative juices. Not all of them directed, thank god, at Wayfarer (my novel). That had been one of the problems I was facing before, that every idea I came up with tended to get sucked into the Wayfarer cosmos...