TAU CETI: The Playlist
Over the years writing TAU CETI, I’ve had a short playlist of songs that I felt either captured a theme of the story or the mood of a particular scene.
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Writing
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Tau Ceti: Chapter 1 Sneak Peak
Meet the crew of the experimental ship Santa Maria. It’s not a happy crew, but that’s OK, they may all die soon anyway…
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Dramatis personae: The Characters of TAU CETI
TAU CETI is a big, complex story with a large cast of characters. This non-exhaustive list gives all of the important characters.
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Tau Ceti: Final Chapter Titles?
With thirty-eight chapters and a prologue, TAU CETI is an epic tale, with this final draft starting at 159,000 words.
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TAU CETI: Michelle’s Lost Prologue
TAU CETI has had two different prologues over the course of its existence. Neither are in the final edit of the book. This is the second prologue, told from Michelle’s perspective, a flash forward from very near the end of the story.
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The SpeckLit Years
There have been two important people on my path to writing short fiction. I’ve talked about one of them, Janet Reid, many times. The other person, I don’t know as much about: Alex F. Fayle.
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Strategies to Fix a Broken Story
There’s four different ideas that I’ve picked up in writing courses, in interactions with other writers, and on the advice of a literary agent.
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Author Brand Identity (Updated 2026)
It’s hard to disagree with someone more successful than you. So maybe you need to figure out why you disagree.
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TAU CETI backstory: The Third World War
TAU CETI opens about a decade after the end of the third world war. Many of the crew of the Santa Maria participated in that war: Jeffery Carter was a submarine, Michelle Patterson was a test pilot…
Tau Ceti, writer's life, Writing
The Three Alien Dynasties of TAU CETI
In the soon-to-be released novel TAU CETI, there are four alien species from two of the three dynasties that define the evolution of sentient life in our galaxy.