Anthony Dobranski Online

Category: craft

  • How writers read (sometimes)

    How writers read (sometimes)

    I have no forethought, only an inadvertent method-acting, the way that some travelers unthinkingly restyle their hair to local norms. I really don’t know myself, at all. Existential panic notwithstanding, it’s a huge timesaver.

  • Real people in my fiction

    Real people in my fiction

    The recent Steven Soderbergh movie Let Them All Talk tells the story of a successful old writer, hoping to reconnect with two closest friends of her youth — but one friend feels the writer’s exposure of her real-life secrets, in the writer’s most successful book, led to her divorce and subsequent poverty. I can’t promise…

  • Quarantine Inspiration on The Inner Loop Radio!

    The Inner Loop is a Washington DC live-reading group that hosts fiction, non-fiction and poetry writers at monthly events. I’ve been pleased and proud to read work there twice. They also run a terrific podcast on all aspects of writing. This week I’m part of their Qurantine Inspiration Series, with my own 12-minute creative stimulus…

  • On being good at sales

    I am a fierce fan of my stuff. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for more than might initially see themselves buying it.

  • Recovering technophiliac

    I use a MacBook Air 2012, second version of the Air line and model for all that follow. It’s a perfect size for serious work, with a screen that usefully shows a half-dozen apps in a single desktop space. It’s substantial yet light, easily portable, fine in a lap or a desk. It has local…

  • Destroying Budapest

    My science-fiction work-in-progress is set in a single city, and I needed to see it to imagine living in it. Welcome to Pest! Only walk on gray parts…. Budapest was a proxy in the One-Day War between Greater Russia and Umoja East Africa. Buda is now the White Lake, a boiling toxic waste of microscopic…

  • A quick hello during a busy season

    I am sorry to have been so silent. In between summer travels with family, all my projects have been in construction phases, and I don’t like vague-posting. But, news. I have several author events scheduled for this fall. You can find me at: The Fredericksburg Independent Book Festival, Fredericksburg, VA, Sat Sep 23 YABBAFest, Warrenton,…

  • Hello Florida Supercon – goodbye wonderful Raleigh!

    Hope to see you this coming weekend, July 27-30, at Florida Supercon in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I’ll be at the Bard’s Tower booth all four days of the con with Kevin J. Anderson, Josh Vogt, Kevin Ikenberry, Keith DeCandido, and J Scott Savage. I have one scheduled panel, on using real world experiences in fiction, at…

  • Hello Connecticon 2017 – and thanks!

    Tonight I fly north to Hartford, CT, to join the Bard’s Tower booth opening Friday at Connecticon. It’s the first of three cons I’m doing in July at Bard’s Tower, with other fantastic writers. Cons are intense, by design, and they’re also long days standing on concrete. Three cons in four weekends is a heavy…

  • New Demon trading cards!

    New Demon trading cards!

    As a promotion on social media for The Demon in Business Class, I created a virtual trading card deck. For cons, I printed card versions of the nine character pictures. They were done as a last-minute inspiration, made by shoving the cards’ original Instagram proportions into a business card template on Moo.com, the excellent online…