Big Idea Category

The Big Idea: Caitlin Kittredge

I wish I could tell you something about Night Life, the dark fantasy novel by Caitlin Kittredge, but I can’t, because I haven’t read it. And the reason I haven’t read it is that when it came in, my wife looked at it, thought it looked interesting, and took it. And since then she’s entirely […]

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The Big Idea: J.F. Lewis

Vampire novels: ever get tired of reading the gothic angst of the undead? J.F. Lewis did — a minor issue, because, you see, he sort of wanted to write a vampire novel himself. So what do you do when you’re in a situation like that? You go back to first principles and re-examine what it […]

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The Big Idea: Julie Buxbaum

Since this is a feature called “The Big Idea,” it’s worth asking how authors get to the big idea in their books in the first place — do they start with the big idea and then build around it, or do they start writing and hope they come across a big idea while they’re going […]

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The Big Idea: Jennifer Pelland

First, a thanks to the writers/editors/publicists who responded to the call for more Big Ideas — y’all rock. For everyone else, I got a lot of interest, and over the next few weeks, you should see an interesting mix of writers swing by here to share their ideas about their books. I know you’re a-quiver […]

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The Big Idea: Jami Attenberg

For her debut novel The Kept Man, writer Jami Attenberg fashioned a nice, big challenge for herself: having her main character unravel a mystery about her husband’s life — a husband who was not dead, but in a coma for six years. It’s easy to create a character who is a widow; examples abound in […]

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The Big Idea: Paul Melko

Paul Melko is another member of the Ohio SF/F Cabal (our motto: There’s More Of Us Than You Think™), and he’s just released his first novel, Singularity’s Ring, to a not inconsiderable amount of acclaim (“[A] superior debut… the ingenious character development and startling images and ideas are deeply satisfying” — Publishers Weekly). Some of […]

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The Big Idea: Philip Palmer

Hey look! Another “The Big Idea” feature! See, now you can tell they are really here to stay on Whatever: we’ve had two of them. In today’s installment: Philip Palmer. Palmer is a novelist, with the new and ambitiously all-over-the-place space opera/comedy/pirate adventure Debatable Space. He’s also a been screenwriter for several British television series, […]

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