For my European readers (or those of you interested in going to Italy this fall!) I will be in Italy at the end of October as the guest of honor at the Lucca Comics & Games Festival. I will announce my exact festival schedule once it is finalized. For more details check out my upcoming events page.

The sixth installment of the 2016 Sanderson Lectures, “The Business of Writing,” is now live! If you missed last week’s episode, “The Box,” you can catch up on all the videos here. Enjoy!

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Elemental Thriller Q&A, we fielded the following questions about the “Thriller” elemental genre from listeners on Facebook and Twitter:

• How do I build tension consistently through my story?
• How do you maintain tension during dialog?
• When do you not use a cliffhanger?
• Do you ever picture your scenes as if they were in a movie?
• How much elemental thriller is too much for a book that isn’t a thriller? What’s the tipping point where you’ve switched genres?
• What do you do when the tension in your story peaks too early?

My assistant Adam has updated the Twitter post archive for July.