Category: fiction
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Doors of Stone release prep : Kingkiller Reread Intro
Ten years ago, I read Name of the Wind and felt captured by a kindred spirit who cared deeply about the state of the world, the fantasy canon, and the capacity of prose to be poetry and myth. Five years later, I read Wise Man’s Fear and the feeling compounded as I started noticing layers:…
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Worldbuilding Checklist for Writers
Every story needs a small, believable world but when you’re worldbuilding for an epic fantasy or historical saga, what can you do? You can apply a simple checklist to the other worlds and cultures that interact with the small, knowable world of your main character — both his foreign and his familiar. I’ll elaborate on each…
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251 Fantasy Literary Agents : an Address Book
As I’m finishing up my fifth novel, the time has come for me to search once more for Fantasy literary agents. It seems kind of pointless for me to put in all of this work to find fantasy literary agents and share it with no one. So I made an address book — a phonebook…
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The Best 40 Tor Online Stories since 2008
Went through the Tor online archive today. While there, I drummed up what I think are the best forty stories published at Tor online since 2008. They move from the most recent to the least recent, with #1 published in 2017 and #40 published in 2008. The best Tor online stories includes tales written by…
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Follow Your Bliss : Results of Joseph Cambell’s Advice
Featured tool: I use this tool to discover new authors through whom I follow my bliss. Let me share it with you. Seldom do I mention this here, but I minored in ancient literature and mythology in college. In my last semester, the academic dean helped me build a one-on-one class with him that featured…
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Small Stories for Kids: SCARY DRESS UP by 8-year-old Harry Neuenschwander
It was a cold night when suddenly Jack heard something. So he went downstairs. “It was coming from the kitchen,” he said as he walked in. Then he screamed and ran out of the kitchen. “Ahhh!” But it was actually his big brother Sam dressing as a ghost. “I just wanted to scare you so…
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Mr. Two Face Dark Knight : Meeting Jongluers and Troubadours in my Dark Knight Rewatch
I could be called Mr. Two Face Dark Knight when it comes to analysis and thinking — reflectively — on the films and books I read. I don’t know about you, but I find myself wrong more often than I’m right. Likely that’s because everything we don’t know is infinite. Everything we do know is finite. And…
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Kindle Faults :: 10 Things My Kindle Can’t Do
There are 10 things my Kindle can’t do. These Kindle faults show the power of preferring a standard paperback: Exist without a Power Source – Unfortunately, somebody bought out Nicolae Tesla’s patents. As is, we have no Tesla Coils to transmit electricity to our Kindle through midair. I’ve had two separate occasions where I ran out…
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Artistic Resistance :: Reflections
IN Aids to Reflection, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says the following (he often enjoyed employing the use of all-caps): READER!—You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this in another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which…
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Why Tara and I Quit Social Media. All Of It.
Starting this month, Tara and I quit social media. All of it. Deleted about ten years of followers on Twitter accidentally — that kind of kicked it off. Then I deleted about 25k in Reddit karma. Nothing to brag about, but certainly not an insubstantial amount either. She got rid of Instagram and Facebook. I…
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The Ballad of the Morning of the Writer
with deference to Stephen Pressfield Before she opened eyes, she heard Alarms — her shouting clock. She’d set it for her pre-dawn words. Her dry-mouth-taste: a sock? The children soon would rise from bunks And writing time would end But blank pages await. Tales trunked— They whispered, “Sleep again.” Children took out the pep from her…
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Cliché Vindicated: Concessions to Ms. Eberhardt
Two kinds of people argue with themselves: maniacs and metaphysicists. The maniac argues with himself the way a divorced couple argues: hashing up old arguments that lead nowhere simply because he’s in the habit of doing so. In that endless cycle, he becomes unsure of how he exactly he lost his way. The metaphysicist — the…