An Author's Voice

On the evening of 25 November 1809, a British diplomat named Benjamin Bathurst stood in the yard of an inn called the White Swan, in the Prussian town of Perleberg, and stepped around the heads of his carriage horses...

I stopped after book one on purpose I read A Game of Thrones around the time the second book came out. Call it 1998. I liked it a great deal, and then I put the series down and walked away from it for good. I'd already...

I found a security hole in my own code Back in the second post I told you how I made one codebase run two separate sites, and how proud I was of the test that guards them. A few days after that, I sat down and tried to...

The hero's journey is scaffolding you build with, then take down The hero's journey is a circle with seventeen stations on it. Ordinary world at the top, then the call, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, all the...

Episodes 1 through 7 of Book Battles are now open to everyone. No account, no paywall. That's 21 books and series argued over across 7 episodes. 8 of them have dropped out of the conversation, and those are the ones I'd...

Walter White. Amy Dunne. Tyrion at his worst. The Jackal from Red Rising, who I have no business rooting for and root for anyway. You have your own list. And you know the feeling on it: the small private embarrassment...

A book page is a poster Back in the first post I said I write worlds with rules you can poke at, and that I wanted a reader to actually poke. This is the post where they can. Here's the thing a static book page can...

You've had the thought, probably at a moment you'd rather not admit to. Is this real, or is it just the situation? Some of us met someone during a bad year. A deployment, or the 8 months when everything was coming apart...

One engine, two faces I needed a second website, and I already had the code for the first one sitting right there. The obvious move was to copy the folder. Copy the folder, point a new domain at it, change the colors...

I stopped renting my readers Last spring I clicked the most important button on my own website and hit a locked door. The button said "Read Free Stories." I'd put it front and center, the thing I most wanted a new...

The content discusses the common struggle writers face when unable to draft specific chapters. It distinguishes between two types of "stuck" moments: those caused by personal motivation issues and those arising from...

In a futuristic high school, all students have their abilities scored and displayed, defining their social status. Sixteen-year-old Kes struggles with an embarrassing past that haunts him. His unique trait, Flux, is...

The author emphasizes the importance of the "Orient" stage in the revision process, demonstrating how one clean paragraph from a work-in-progress can conceal vital emotional content. By analyzing the passage's purpose...

The author emphasizes the importance of the "Orient" stage in the revision process, demonstrating how one clean paragraph from a work-in-progress can conceal vital emotional content. By analyzing the passage's purpose...

The article discusses the challenges writers face during revisions and emphasizes that the issue often lies not in writing skills but in a missing cognitive step, termed "Orient." It introduces the OODA loop model...