It’s a time-honored tradition.
Continue reading “Running Around in Video Game Levels You’ve Completed Already For No Apparent Reason (and Then Also Looking at Maps)”Tag: fiction
How to Write After You Break the Streak
I told the world I would write every day. Then I stopped for a week. And now writing is scary again.
Continue reading “How to Write After You Break the Streak”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!
Continue reading “A Talking Cat!?! Finally, A LitRPG Heroine We Can Believe In”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.
Continue reading “What Is a LitRPG? A Simple Guide for the Deeply Confused”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!
Continue reading “Writing a Small-Scope LitRPG?”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?
Continue reading “Oops! My “Quick Side Project” is Consuming Untold Years”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.
Continue reading “Fluke (1995): More Like This Movie Was A Fluke”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.
Continue reading “Hide No More: The Masquerade Trope in Fantasy Fiction (And How Elatsoe Kills It)”StopTank and Writing For the Heck of It
Sometimes you just gotta write a thing without knowing whether you’ll ever put it somewhere.
Continue reading “StopTank and Writing For the Heck of It”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.
Continue reading “Karakuridōji Ultimo Review: Too Much Promise”