the blog.
Jun 26, 2018
As I’ve said in the past, action scenes are usually what starts me on a writing project, or what gets me out of being stuck. But how do ‘action scenes’ work anyway? Action scenes are often more about emotion than physical action. Putting my characters through the emotional wringer is a great way to break up […]
Jun 12, 2018
I was recently sitting in a panel about representation at a con when one of the panelists repeated something I’d heard before, “REPRESENTATION SAVES LIVES.” Unlike the other times I’d heard it, those words hit me square between the eyes like a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. So, I’m going to jump into […]
Jun 6, 2018
I love world building. I assume that most people who write, run roleplaying games, or tell original stories in any other way do as well. I’ve got a drawer full of concepts that are really just about worlds I want to explore. And for me that’s a huge piece of all this, I want to […]
May 30, 2018
I just got another rejection from a publisher for ‘Tomahawk Incident‘ so I thought I’d talk about that this week. It sucks, we all know it, but it’s just a part of the business. You gotta have thick skin if you’re going to be in a creative field. My degree is in fine art, sculpture […]
May 15, 2018
We’ll start this with a pretty picture and idyllic feeling. All you have to do is play the video below to be filled with a sense of pastoral, green tech and communal wonder. The fact that it’s a commercial for a factory farmed, mass market yogurt company (Chobani) is probably smashing the irony button just […]
May 8, 2018
What I refer to Arcanopunk/Arcanepunk is some seriously fun, messy territory to play around in. Arcanopunk is a far less clearly defined genre than either Steampunk or Dieselpunk, but to me it shares the same ‘technological’ justification. Magic or some other mystical energy ‘powers’ the world. This can be blended with spell-slinging, but at the end of […]
May 3, 2018
As I’ve been trying to get my blog working – that is to say properly connected to social media, it’s been… trying. Since I needed to once again test to see if it’s connecting to anything other than some Hellscape-social-media-apocalypse-dimension, I thought I’d make it a bit more fun. Here we are. Drag and drop […]
May 1, 2018
In my first Genre Hell post, I gave a quick definition of what I think Steampunk is, but after doing a much more in-depth post on Dieselpunk, I figured I should probably go back to my “home” genre and dig in a bit. Steam Power is the foundation of Steampunk as a genre to me. As […]
Apr 25, 2018
After last week’s post I realized that some people may only be passingly familiar with what I’m talking about when I refer to Steampunk/Dieselpunk/Arcanopunk/Solarpunk, and the dizzying array of other genres out there. I thought I’d talk about what defines some of these genres to me. My definition of several genres is based on an overarching […]
Apr 17, 2018
After fighting the good fight for a while trying to determine what genres I write in, it’s now clear to me that there are no ‘rules’ beyond staggeringly incoherent broad strokes. The genres I write in are Sci Fi and Fantasy. Easy enough to break those out. But then you go down the rabbit hole. […]