Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps. Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find […]
I watch a fair bit of pro-wrestling. Partially because I’m a fan and partially because it’s an extraordinarily complex sequential narrative with decades of continuity, and I like figuring out what I can learn from it as a writer. If you’ve got twenty minutes to spare, Max Landis does a phenomenal job of explaining the […]
So I’ve been doing this writing thing for a while now. Eighteen years, more or less, once you factor in the time spent working on poetry, scripts, gaming stuff, an unfinished thesis, and stories as a collective whole. I still go out and learn to do stuff. And I still read stuff where I am thoroughly […]
2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep […]
So my boss caught up on the Novella Dairy yesterday and commented on the fact that I was crapping on Stephen King in my post asking for feedback about the future of the project. “I crapped on Stephen King?” I said. “I don’t remember doing that.” “Sure you do,” she said. “You basically quote him […]
Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked: I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that? Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not […]
The second thing that can’t be learned about writing by listening to Al Snow rant: People don’t have a physical relationship with pro-wrestling. This is fricking brilliant, and it’s something every SF writer should memorize immediately. If you look at most forms of athletic competition there’s usually a correlation between the most popular sports and the sports […]
