Writing a novel is a balancing act. It starts with the Big Three (characterization, setting/world-building, plot). Each of those usually has the potential to expand exponentially in several different directions at once. At the start (and sometimes all the way through the middle), it seems as if
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →Holidays are part of every human culture we currently know about, going back as far as we have records. There are a few that are nearly universal – planting and harvest festivals, solstices, equinoxes. Unsurprisingly, these tend to be based around natural cycles of the sun or
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →Every so often, I get a question that makes me blink. The most recent one was something along the lines of “How would a matriarchal society work, especially in terms of politics, child rearing, property, gender roles, religion, etc.?” I always want to start my answers with
Read more →I just finished reading a series that I thought was a bit of an object lesson, both in terms of what I think worked and what I think didn’t, so I decided to break a ten-year streak and actually review some fiction. The series is Anne Bishop’s
Read more →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
Read more →
