This morning is not the world’s greatest morning for a packaged sound bite about writing. The World Fantasy Awards have been released and nothing that I read and liked won. There’s a new conflict about how to handle serial sexual harassers in an entertainment industry adjacent to mine–everyone agrees that they should be handled, but […]
I woke up last night out of a nightmare due to the fact that I don’t have a list of tasks longer than my arm to accomplish STAT, only things that I really ought to get to sooner rather than later, and I was worried that I missed something vital. In the dream, my teeth
Personally, I think if you’re going to end a horror story on an “everybody dies” note, it has to be because the characters chose it that way OR out of irony when they do everything right but it still doesn’t work, not because they oopsed into failure. If the situation was always hopeless, there never
One of the worst parts about continuously growing as a writer is having to unpick lessons that I have oh-so-painfully learned. It would be nice if I could look at the situation as putting down a crutch I no longer need–but there’s far more work involved on my part. I have to do it slowly
This marketing stuff gets a little easier. As I try different things, as I get more feedback from readers, I’m starting to realize who my readers are and what they want. Why me? Why not Stephen King? Or rather why me and Stephen King? What they want tells me how to market (not that I’m
The loudest people in the room, the ones who dominate the conversation, aren’t the most interesting ones. They mostly just have this trick of being animated while they talk. Excited about what they have to say. At great length and, often, volume. Wit and charm help. So does a sense of order in one’s storytelling.
Your words are pointless but don’t say them here. Your actions are too small to make a difference, so why don’t you just give up? Your protests are useless and will change nothing but we refuse to tolerate them. You’re just doing this to make yourself sound more important than you really are. And if
Cheesy is when you have something that uses a lot of tropes, but there’s no twist on the tropes. Cheesy-but-good is rereadable and rewatchable cheese. Nothing wrong with cheesy per se. But once you put a twist on it, you’re doing something on another level entirely. … If you liked this post, check out my
Bias is like smoking. Or rather it sets up shop on the same not-quite-conscious level as smoking. A trigger occurs and the bias follows with a knee-jerk reaction. It’s not a conscious intention, so it’s easy to justify. It feels natural, part of the natural order of things–maybe not right, exactly, but that’s just the way
But can’t you see I’m the me? The only true me? I’m the special one. Any group to which I belong is automatically the special group. In any situation which is black and white, the white side is the one that has built itself around me, because I’m the me. I graciously admit when I’m
