A very nice profile written by Rachel Shields of Urban Office in Portland.
“As for the actual craft of writing, John strives to create worlds and characters that feel real. “A lot of science fiction is about people who just don’t seem real at all, and it’s hard to relate to. Even though I set my books a thousand years in the future, I want my human characters and how they behave to be recognizable.”
In addition to sci-fi greats Jerry Pournelle, S. M. Sterling, and Elizabeth Moon, John also admires Tom Clancy’s writing. “There’s a lot of stuff about Tom Clancy that people don’t like, but he’s really good at making you feel like something is real and getting all the details right — consistently right. No one else has really been able to imitate that.”
John recommends The War of Art by Steven Pressfield as a transformative book for people who want to get creative work done. “He has this concept of resistance, which is all the things in your head that keep you from sitting down and doing whatever your work is — the BS reasons you come up with for not doing it right now.” And, of course, one of the primary tools for resisting the resistance is just to sit down and do the work, even if you don’t like it or want to