Every so often, I run into someone who is…a bit confused about the way magic works in fantasies. They generally fall into one of two categories—either they have read that “a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and interpreted it to mean “all magic is/should-be just
Read more →Words can mean more than they actually say. In real life, people commonly provide an indirect, implied answer to a question, instead of a direct one—“How do you like your hamburgers?” “I’m a vegetarian.” (implying “…so I don’t eat hamburgers, which means I don’t have a way
Read more →Once again, it’s open mike time! Who’s working on what, how’s it going, what else are you all up to…whatever you want.
Read more →“For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all
Read more →It’s been a long time since I wrote a short story. I think my grand lifetime total of short stories is about twenty, of which perhaps twelve were publishable. This is because I’m a natural novelist, which is also why I don’t tend to talk about writing
Read more →After doing this for as long as I have, I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly all writers have a point in their process where their story is fragile. It’s a different point for every writer, and sometimes different stories become brittle at different points, unexpectedly. A
Read more →Last Open Mike day, Emily mentioned in the comments that she was having trouble figuring out a subplot. I started an answer, then realized I had a lot to say and that some of it would probably be of interest to other people, too. So I decided
Read more →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 →It’s Open Mike day again, and we now have an icon to represent it! And it’s also the vernal equinox (OK, a few hours after the actual equal point, which happened before midnight, so technically the equinox was yesterday, but close enough). Talk amongst yourselves while I
Read more →There are some questions that all writers get, over and over and over. Anything that is repeated that many times gets very old, very fast. One of the most irritatingly common questions is the perennial “Where do you get your ideas?” But even more irritating are the
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