Authors Electric

There are fantasy novels built on spectacle, and then there are fantasy novels built on emotional truth. Shattered Energy: A Memory in Time by Athena Plencner manages to deliver both. At its center is Ariyana, a woman whose terrifying dreams begin to unravel the reality she thought she knew, forcing her to confront loss, identity, and the dangerous truths buried inside her own memory. As we celebrate Mother’s Day here in the United States, it feels especially fitting to talk about a novel whose heroine remains, through all the chaos and revelations surrounding her, a fiercely loving and deeply protective mother. Even while facing impossible choices, Ariyana’s concern for her children never leaves the emotional center of the story. I spoke with Athena Plencner about memory, dragons, fear, vulnerability, and building worlds that feel both epic and deeply human. Dianne Pearce: The idea that Ariyana’s dreams are actually memories is so compelling. What sparked that concept for you? Ariyan...

  May is only the beginning of a ride I believed I had taken before and urgently need to take now. In my 15 years of publishing on Kindle I'd always loved the writing part but had always moved on to the next book as an award-winning writer between publishers and agents without bothering to market or hustle my work. But something remarkable happened as I approached two milestones. My first Kindle book, Nobility, had never been available in paperback. Something about rights management had condemned it to only digital status. But this book had always been special to me and had had a curious history, sitting for years on the desks of publishers and agents. Too short. Too dark as a Christmas thriller with a hard-won happy ending (written long before the wave of dark and violent Yule movies). I'd drawn up a long list of other short books sold as novels instead of novellas. No market for a story of a broken man who'd betrayed his country and an angel who's no angel against a b...

When we write novels, we often imagine an ideal reader, someone smart, curious, and eager to dive into our worlds. But there’s an important fact many authors overlook: the  average  American adult reads at about a seventh to eighth grade level. And more than half of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level. That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy complex stories, but it does mean that overly dense prose or elaborate sentence structures can make a book harder to access. If you use Microsoft Word, the built-in Editor can give you a readability score based on the  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level . This tells you the U.S. school grade needed to understand your text on first read. A score of “8” means the average eighth grader could easily follow it. You can turn this feature on in  File → Options → Proofing → Show Readability Statistics  after running a spelling and grammar check. Another measure you may hear about is the  Lexile Framework for Reading . The Lexile scor...