#JanuaryWorldbuilders The political situation. The world is divided between a genocidal superpower and an alliance increasingly dominated by a secret society which regards its status as the world's Lesser of Two Evils as permanent and irrevocable.

#TimeTravelAuthors It's not a time-travel project, but I'm working on ARCHSTONE, a heist story set in a world with certain possibly-magical-or-at-least-mysterious elements.

#TimeTravelAuthors And Gary was very much a package deal. Hanging out with him meant getting used to his towering intellect, his love of knowledge and his hunger to understand the universe and explain it to everybody who would hold still long enough. And were those really such terrible things?

#WIPSnips “You married this woman,” said Attorney Murthex, barely able to keep the sneer out of his voice that he hadn’t left her behind in a Swelterlander port like a proper gentleman so he could come home and marry a good Aulmish girl.

#JanuaryWorldbuilders The Beach of Bones is a lovely stretch of beach that nobody ever visits, because there are still fragments of human bone and teeth to be found all along its length, along with shreds of torn clothing and stone monuments that say "LOOK WHAT YOU MADE US DO."

#JanuaryWorldbuilders First, there's the arch of heaven itself. Imagine a set of Saturn-style rings seen from below. Second, there's the Great Rift, a thousand-plus-mile canyon where the supercontinent of the Vastlands is starting to break apart.

The Truth about Venezuela.

Drop someone ANGRY 😡🖤🤬

#JanuaryWorldbuilders I'm still trying to decide how much of this iceberg of worldbuilding I should let the reader see. But the old classical civilizations, long since swallowed by desert, will definitely remain mysterious to the reader even though some of my characters were there 4-6K years ago.

#JanuaryWorldbuilders My name is Paul Briggs. I'm the author of the Locksmith Trilogy and some other stuff. I'm building the World Beneath the Arch. It's an Earth-type planet, but with planetary rings instead of a moon, which has implications for the calendar, tides, nyctophobia… lots of things.

#WIPSnips “Gramphborough must be a total roast penguin to you.” “A what?” “Did I not teach you that idiom? I’m sorry. Something you traveled a long way for that turned out to be… not worth it.” Koa shrugged. “You told me a lot about this city before we came. I didn’t expect much to begin with.”

#TimeTravelAuthors At first it seemed like another world, but why was it so familiar? Then it seemed like our world, but where were the people? Then they found it was the future, but how did it happen?

#WIPSnips “It sounds like my father stuck to his daily routine right to the very end. If it was me, and I thought somebody who worked in the same building with me was plotting to do me in, I’d have been dodging around like an oystercatcher in heavy surf.”

#TimeTravelAuthors What if you knew the end was coming? What if you knew you could stop it, but you didn't know how? What would you do? Who would you trust? How far would you go to save the world? www.amazon.com/dp/B0B3315STN

#WIPSnips To the east, on the other side of the stream, the cliff face bulged outward, erasing all paths other than the one that led further down into the Rift. The setting sun painted the rock a fiery shade of gold, and clearly outlined all their shadows on it.

#WIPSnips “In the isthmus, we held our own. At sea, we held our own. In the north… we were like a school threeball team that somehow got into a match with the Wodei White Sharks, and they were not being chivalrous. We never had a chance. They clobbered us.”

#TimeTravelAuthors As Gary puts in in Book 1, “Well, the good news is, we don’t have to worry about our grandkids coming along and shooting us just to see what’ll happen…”

Avengers: Doomsday, only in theaters next December.

#WIPSnips Lonotun headed for the rear door. So did the butler, but Lonotun waved him back. This was Lodge business. The man at the door was short and fat, with dark brown skin and iron-gray hair. He was wearing gold-threaded saffron silk robes embroidered in a Songthal pattern under a dust-shroud…

#TimeTravelAuthors It was a gift from old Ben Tarnhelm… It might well be the only copy of the book in existence, because it was written by a woman who had never been born — her family had been poisoned in a failed attempt to prevent the portal from ever existing.

#WIPSnips As for the doctor… “Tactics and strategy are not my fields of study. But I’d say if you made a mistake that cost your people the battle, the fault doesn’t lie with you. It lies with whoever put a 17-year-old in charge of a regiment to begin with.”

#WIPSnips “On Fireday night he brought me a typewriter. He told me I had all of Waterday and Sunday to type up a perfect copy of a document in Aulmish, but I had to have it done by Sunday night so he could return the typewriter. I finished it by Waterday afternoon. And I can’t even read Aulmish.”

#WIPSnips …and the colors were so elusive, rich delicious shades of indigo and plum shading to rosewood and mahogany-like crimson that made me painfully hard, somehow more erotic than any naked woman I’d ever seen or imagined… …veins of forest green, sparks of deep gold that came and went so quick…

#TimeTravelAuthors In LOCKSMITH'S WAR, the characters stay up past midnight planning the heist.

Cartoon by Kevin KAL Kallaugher

Merry Christmas! www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtXq...

#TimeTravelAuthors Nostalgia seems like too mild a word for Lock's feelings about his father, until you remember that the word literally means "homecoming pain."

#WIPSnips Where they were standing looked like a primitive idea of the edge of the world. At their backs was the canyon wall, a mix of cliffside and escarpment that averaged out to about a 45-degree angle. It was studded with tough little conifer shrubs…

#AvatarFireAndAsh is a movie that teaches us that even the smallest of us can stand up and act as a human shield for somebody ten feet tall, and somehow it'll work.

#TimeTravelAuthors Lock's guidance counselor Lucy Thames is easily the nicest person in the whole trilogy. She helps Lock through some difficult times, and joins in the search for him when he goes missing.

#WIPSnips As soon as Rhadmin saw the interrogator, he knew this was serious. Not because she was intimidating, but because she wasn’t. She was maybe forty, on the plump side, with silver-streaked dark hair and the kind and guileless face of a kindergarten teacher.

A Lord of the Rings cover band called The Blackpink Riders

#TimeTravelAuthors Rikki "HIDE THE PORN! MOM'S COMING THROUGH!" Mannheim is someone you want to have at your side in a crisis. She's also a fountain of inappropriate humor.

#WIPSnips “Excuse me—‘safe little islands?’ Ever seen ocean waves three stories high? Ever had a horven squid grab your leg?” “No.” “Me either, but I heard stories. They seek out warm-blooded prey and swallow it alive so they can take advantage of its body heat.”

I hit a new personal low today. I bought somebody socks for #Christmas. Good socks, but still, socks.

#TimeTravelAuthors The interrogation room was just as Lock remembered it. He and Gary were left alone there. They sat quietly for a moment, but then Gary opened his mouth. Lock motioned for him to shut it. “Dude,” he whispered, “before you say anything… you see that mirror?”

#WIPSnips Lonotun hadn't realized how good Kuvran winter gear was until he'd stolen some. He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and gripped it into place. Even the dragon-winds blowing off the icecap couldn't bite through it. No wonder they're winning this war, he thought.

#TimeTravelAuthors 100 years forward and backward, to the day. That's what the portal was set to when it was/will be/would have been first made, and there's no one left/born yet who understands the technology well enough to change it, assuming it can be changed.

#TimeTravelAuthors “Well, there’s three things we did,” said Gary. “First, whenever we went away from the campfire we stopped for a few seconds to give our eyes time to adjust. Second, we stuck to the clearings instead of going too far into the woods. Third, we… fell down and hurt ourselves a lot.”

#WIPSnips Attam was already trying to line up a shot on the fleeing glider when the doctor grabbed the barrel of his rifle and shoved it away. “What are you doing, young man? This is a peaceful expedition!” “He just dropped a flare practically on top of us!”

#TimeTravelAuthors 9. In Lock's first solo flight in the future, he turned off the radio because it was distracting. He wasn't supposed to do that. 11. The reason for the first novel is Lock's need to keep secrets. The reason for the second two? His mom has the same need.

#WIPSnips “You have to understand, sir—the Sea Lions had won the national championship two years in a row, and were one victory away from the playoffs. The Ulahan Threshers, as usual, were only going to the playoffs if somebody bought them tickets. It was the last minute of the fourth quarter…”

#TimeTravelAuthors Lock's mother is originally from Australia, and we can only assume, very proud of its history. She named her secondborn son "Lachlan Macquarie Smith," as if Lachlan Macquarie didn't have enough things named after him already.

#WIPSnips “Because one of my favorite pastimes, long ago, was to turn into a steppe hare, like so”—in an eyeblink, Mr. Hare seemed to shrink on himself until he disappeared, leaving empty clothes to collapse into the chair. No, not quite empty. There was a moving lump inside the tunic…

#TimeTravelAuthors The series begins with Gary crushing on Lock's mom and ends with him planning to devote his life to cracking the physics of time travel.

#WIPSnips ”…that she doesn’t leave this room alive.” “She won’t, Excellent Master.” “Did I ever tell the story of how my grandfather came to this city?” “Please tell me, Excellent Master,” said Charkun, rather than lie that he hadn’t heard it five or six times. There went the next fifteen minutes.

#TimeTravelAuthors The first part was the front hall, parlor and dining room, all of which were big, expensive-looking and had the same feel… like they were decorated by space aliens who’d heard of humans but never met any.

#WIPSnips “When I get this back to the lab,” he said, corking and labeling the vial, “I expect I’ll find small percentages of sulfurous and sulfuric acid, along with traces of dissolved minerals.”

#TimeTravelAuthors 'Twas the night before morrow, and Locksmith and friends Were groping for weaponry at the world's end. They wished more than anything they weren't there As barking of the dogs came through the air And Rikki with pepper spray, and Lock with his shovel Stood bracing for trouble…

#WIPSnips Someone—Arkhöa couldn’t remember who—once said, “The greatest cities belong to the world.” If you thought of Grand Harbor as a single city rather than a collection of smaller ones in close proximity, there was no greater city beneath the arch. Its population was two million and climbing.