Taxes in fiction

Taxes occupy an interesting position in the human psyche: for most of us, they are both boring and scary, as well as inevitable and deeply annoying. Mostly, they are scary because people don’t know how to fill out the horrible, overcomplicated tax forms, and/or don’t have the

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Tipping points

Alternate history is one of my favorite things, both for reading and writing. There’s something about taking real-life history/culture/politics/etc. and twisting it in a different direction that I find enormously appealing and interesting. The thing is, I keep running across people who define “alternate history” a lot

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Building the world

First, a couple of announcements. The audiobook of Sorcery and Cecelia is now available. Audiobooks for The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician will be coming in January; The Grand Tour is currently available for preorders. The second announcement is that in January I will be teaching a

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Designing Magic

Fantasy writers are often advised “to know the rules for your magic.” But “knowing the rules” does not necessarily mean that writers need to make up a list of dos and don’ts and a lot of magical theory. What they do need to know – and keep

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The Cool Stuff

The coolness factor is possibly the best and most useful reason for doing worldbuilding in advance that I know of. A few minutes spent deciding whether the heroine’s adventure will be mostly lost in a jungle, shipwrecked on an island, trapped in a weird hotel, or hiding

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Why start with a world?

One of the things that constantly surprises me is the number of people who put a tremendous amount of pre-writing work into inventing characters and developing plot, but who never stop to consider their setting or world, apart from “They start in a city, then they go

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