Strong and Femme
I’ve never bought into the argument that dismisses a certain kind of female character as badly written because “she’s just a man dressed up in women’s clothing.” I myself am not terribly feminine in...
View ArticleTake It Like a Man
(Content warning: I, uh, talk about violence in this. Rather a lot. Not in gory detail, but if the discussion of traumatic and/or sexual violence bothers you, you may not want to read onward.) My...
View ArticleTen pounds of story in a five-pound sack
I can’t say a lot about the work I do for Legend of the Five Rings because I signed an NDA. But the most recent round of brainstorming for a fiction has me reflecting on what this job is teaching me...
View ArticleHow would you rather be remembered?
On Twitter the other week I posed the question: Would you rather be remembered as having a large body of work with both some amazing things and some crap ones, or a small body of work where everything...
View ArticleRogue One: The Villains
As promised, here is part two of my dissection of Rogue One and how, if I were given a magic wand to reshape the story, I would have done it. Spoilers ahoy, mateys! If you missed part one (all three...
View ArticleNovella thoughts
I’m noodling around with an idea that I think will be a novella, and part of that noodling involves thinking about novellas in general. I don’t have the world’s best grasp on how to pace a story of...
View Articletowards some thoughts on series
I’ve had discussions with other writers about how there’s tons of advice out there on writing novels, but very little on writing series. File this one under “stuff I know how to do, but don’t know how...
View ArticlePerpetuating the Cult of the Badass — Or Not
I know some of you have started to read A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, either via my rec or elsewhere, so you’ll have already seen Devereaux’s sequence of posts about the idea of the “universal...
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picking a series type and laying a foundation
Having made a general typology of series (with a lot of good comments on the DW version of that post in particular, unpacking the various gradations between what I called the Setting Series and the...
View ArticleLet’s have a chapter on men
I’m starting to wonder what it would be like to read a book on daily life in X place and time that starts out by telling you most people, even among the upper classes, spent their days running their...
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