You get bad character writing sometimes. You know, the plot’s chugging along and here comes a character you think you’ve got a handle on, but they do something that makes no sense. You know. Out of character. Because, well, plot. Or you have the narrative telling you “this character is X,” when, in fact, they… Read More How I Write Characters
Last month, my five year old laptop bit the dust and I lost 15,000 words. The laptop had been acting funky for a minute. Finally, without me actually telling it to, the laptop reformatted itself. I’ve used Dropbox for over a decade, and since I bought that laptop in December of 2013 I’ve also made… Read More Lost: 15K Words, Reward Offered
This post is adapted and expanded from a Twitter thread. It may sound familiar to some of you. Do not click this link. (“Indie Sci-Fi Authors Are Upending Traditional Publishing, And It’s Turned Into A War”) It’s hot garbage. I warned you. It’s an article from The Federalist, a conservative web-magazine founded about six years… Read More The Sad Tale of the Ininite Monkeys, Who Just Wanted Science Fiction Without Politics
Sometimes I get to write a sentence – one sentence – that is straight pulp, like Saturday morning cartoons or bubble helmeted heroes fighting green monsters on an alien world.… Read More Long Live the (Well Executed) Trope
Writing a Book 3 is hard. And it feels a whole lot harder with everything going on in the world. My Twitter feed has lately been full of real world shit, politics, fascism, et cetera. That sort of thing makes it difficult to focus on a made-up story about rockets and rayguns. (Even if the underlying themes… Read More Voidstrider Update
Why the Culture Wins is an intriguing examination of one of my all time favorite series. I’ve always appreciated Iain M. Banks’ writing in the Culture novels. His lengthy expository asides peppered with caustic observations often make me laugh aloud. This article looks deep into the implications of the Culture and, for the first time,… Read More Some Things I’m Reading Lately – 2-5-18
