fiction Archives · Page 3 of 5

A Talking Cat!?! Finally, A LitRPG Heroine We Can Believe In

Meet Taipha, the star of my LitRPG series in progress. She’s a cat. She’s a girl. Will she rule the world???

Read on to learn more about her…and her world!

What Is a LitRPG? A Simple Guide for the Deeply Confused

LitRPGs are like books plus video games. And while most websites defining them will assume you already know a lot about video games, I’ll pretend you’re my mom, who hates them and has no idea what kinds of books I’ve been editing for the past several months.

This explanation will be slow and methodical.

Writing a Small-Scope LitRPG?

I’m striving to create a world that’s small but rich with hidden secrets. We don’t always have to save the world!

Oops! My “Quick Side Project” is Consuming Untold Years

How’d I get here, and what can you do if you’re in my shoes?

Fluke (1995): More Like This Movie Was A Fluke

Ah, Fluke. Yet another bizarre, oddly compelling movie that has no right to be oddly compelling. Or bizarre, really. I mean, it’s a dog movie. All it had to be was a dog movie.

Hide No More: The Masquerade Trope in Fantasy Fiction (And How Elatsoe Kills It)

When people recommended the young adult novel Elatsoe to me, it was never as a quirky take on a fantasy world. That’s what it is, though: a modern America with spirit summoners, vicious vampires, and fairy children as its typical citizens. Magic is a known factor that makes travel convenient, complicates crime scenes, causes fantastical global warming.

Rather, the book was introduced to me as a story about grief, healing, and ghosts that features a Native lead. This is also a true statement about what Elatsoe is. What interests me about the discrepancy is how people don’t see a need to mention the setting, bizarre though it may be. Seemingly nobody is saying, “Brace yourselves, because this story has kind of an unusual world…”

That must be because the setting’s not so weird after all. Not since approximately 2005.

StopTank and Writing For the Heck of It

Sometimes you just gotta write a thing without knowing whether you’ll ever put it somewhere.

Karakuridōji Ultimo Review: Too Much Promise

Why does nobody talk about this ambitious, high-octane, bizarrely stylish manga?

When I was in high school, seinen and shōnen manga (especially edgy ones) were my favorite things. Hunter x Hunter, Parasyte, Attack on Titan, Death Note—all series I devoured. But what manga felt like full-on events? I can only think of two: Akira and Ultimo. Akira has such an impressive pedigree (and such a huge print size) that buying it can’t not feel like an event. But all Ultimo had was suspense and promise.

It also had Hiroyuki Takei and Stan Lee, but trust me, I didn’t care about that.

Pretty Strong: Ultimo, Manga Heroes, and Gender Roles in the Early 2010s

Recently I finished Ultimo, a manga which history will remember only as a footnote in Hiroyuki Takei’s career that weirdly has Stan Lee’s name on it. While I didn’t finish it back in the day (when, after many delays, it petered out into a ‘meh’ conclusion), I was always captivated by its high ambition, its sleek art style, and its sheer charm. Take Ultimo himself: his design strikes me as effortlessly cute, cool, and beautiful at the same time.

Cuteness and coolness. Beauty and strength. Today I notice that for Ultimo’s character, these are not contradictions. If anything, his beauty is implied to be the reason he embodies ultimate power and goodness.

Top 5 Most Epic Blondie Movie Endings (Without Context)

Are you a Blondie superfan? Neither am I. Thanks to my funnypaper-reading daddie and my movie buff mommie, though, I’ve absorbed Blondie knowledge all my life against my will. Here are my picks for the top 5 most entertaining Blondie movies, ranked purely by their last 5-50 seconds of runtime.