The stories of Bryan Young

First, the biggest news this week: My latest novel, The Aeronaut, is now available for pre-order in digital formats and will be released in digital and print on November 11, 2015 to commemorate the end of World War I. It's being published by Silence in the Library Publishing. Please click this link and pre-order! Here's the back cover text: The Aeronaut is a tense story, full of action, espionage, and romance, set in an alternate version of World War I. Computational machinery has allowed both sides to make great technological leaps that have made trench warfare even deadlier for the soldiers at the front.    Some men go to war to defend their homeland or to prove something to themselves but Robert Preston has fled America and joined the French Army to escape heartbreak. He's placed in the 5th Aeronautic Corps, an elite unit of the French Army that specializes in jumping over trenches by means of jet packs. It's a dangerous job with a low survival rate, b...

I've challenged myself to writing every day. My writing schedule used to give me weekends off. Or when I didn't feel like it. Or whenever I felt like I was too busy for writing. In recent years I've given myself a day off here and there, but always at least one day off a week. But the more I looked around at successful writers, people who were making a living at it full time, the more I realized that when they said "write every day," what they really meant wasn't "write every business day," or "write every day you can..." They meant "WRITE EVERY DAY." And so I took that as a challenge. I like challenges. It's why I like National Novel Writing Month every year, even though I don't always participate in the way they intended. I just like seeing something I need to update every day with my word count. It keeps my writing every day. I wish someone had a tool of a social website like NaNo's that works all year and t...

I'm pleased to announce that my collection of space opera short stories, Escape Vector , will be available for purchase at Salt Lake Comic Con. You can order it now from Amazon and have me sign it at the show or snag it from me there. Digital versions will be available shortly. (UPDATE: The book will only be available at the show in advance in an advanced state, apparently. The final release will be in October.) I'm incredibly proud of this collection, and I think it's a great cross section of the space opera shorts I've been publishing over the last few years in other publications and a host of new stuff that I'm confident you'll enjoy. It contains twelve stories, including one starring Twelve and Zeke from The Serpent's Head.  I'm very proud of this collection and I think it's much more representative of where my writing is at. It's sometimes hard working in slow motion, the stuff you're seeing published from me is what I was writi...

I learned late last week that Warren Murphy passed away. Some of you might not be familiar with the work of Warren, and that's kind of a shame. He's the guy who created and wrote much of the The Destroyer series, which was incredibly influential on me as a kid. For those who don't know, the series starred Remo Williams and Chiun, both masters of Sinanju and assassins working for the American government and their super-secret agency CURE. They were part of the wave of "Men's Adventure" books from the last century and had a lot of wonderful writing in them, even if they seem incredibly dated by today's more politically correct standards. I started reading them in second grade (why my parents let me, I'll never know) and Remo and Chiun were frequent characters in my schoolyard play.  Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3  and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang  is adapting it into a film. He wrote other books I loved, like Temple Dogs and The Forever Kin...

This week, I want to talk a little bit about pushing yourself and challenging yourself.  It's something I'm a big believer in. I think if you're in a situation where you're writing the same kind of thing over and over and over again, you're not going to be growing as a writer in any meaningful way. I'm the sort of person who needs everything to be at least a little bit difficult or I feel like I'm doing it wrong. I think the best way to learn is to make mistakes and you can't do that if you're not taking risks and not going out on a limb. There are a lot of different ways to challenge yourself and I want to make some suggestions based on ways I've challenged myself with my writing. Deadlines/Speed - Sometimes I'll challenge myself to write a piece that might be acceptable to a publisher in a certain amount of time. Sometimes that's something like, "Can I finish a short story in one sitting?" And other times it's li...