This is a question I’ve seen around, and one that I have to reckon with in Brother Shadow: how do you keep an arrogant character likable? How do you use this as a flaw without making the character completely infuriating? Here’s my theory on how to keep them just the right amount of infuriating. . … Continue reading Making An Arrogant Character Likable, pt1/2
Originally published in Horizons Literary Magazine on 05/01/23 --- . Because. That’s not an answer. Because I said so. That’s not a good answer. Fine, because girls don’t. That’s a bad answer. That’s how it is. That’s not fair. That’s too bad. . Stop fussing. I don’t want to wear that. Why not? I don’t … Continue reading Fiction: Recurring Arguments
My brain works in cycles these days. . I have an ever-growing list of books I want to read. It exists alongside an identically organized (that is, whatever order I thought of them) list of movies and TV shows I want to watch, and a highly dissimilar (that is, painstakingly curated) list of stories that … Continue reading I’m Reading Too Many Books At Once (hooray?)
A few years ago, these went around briefly as a meme on some corner of either Tumblr or Twitter, I don’t fully remember which. They never really caught on, but I really enjoyed the concept, so I’ve kept my personal bingo card of tropes hanging around since then. Years later, the original still holds pretty … Continue reading Authorial Bingo
You know that nagging feeling that you forgot to do something? That feeling is a way of life when you have ADHD, and its not always possible to mentally retrieve whatever the thing was in the first place. Last Tuesday, that feeling came from not posting a post, which I didn’t actually notice until I … Continue reading 150 Days! Also DANGERT I forgot to post about it
If you would like to donate to a cause I have a lot of feelings about, here is one. . Grief is weird. . It’s like getting a repeat 404 error in your brain. “Error: person not found. Guess I’ll do the dishes.” Finding out you were gone was such a crazy experience that I … Continue reading Nonfiction: Grief Is Weird
At the end of part six I said part seven was going to be ghost stories...and then skipped ahead to the wistful love songs. Oops. Well, the post was a day late anyway, and the love songs post was so short I was already considering a double feature, so we're going to loop back to … Continue reading Country Music For People Who Hate Country Music Part 8/10: That Good Spooky Shit, Which I accidentally skipped last time…
This one is a day late, sorry lads. We had a couple of short, quick power outages on Sunday night that managed to fry my motherboard...where the fully edited version of this piece is saved. Oops. That's what I get for using a cheap surge protector. Thankfully she's still under warranty, so I was able … Continue reading Country Music For People Who Hate Country Music, Part 7/10: The Wistful Love Songs Are Back
Yep, crime tales get their own segment. The murder ballad is a classic format, and the broader category of the crime song is as well. These are essentially musical crime fiction, with the unquestionably guilty as their protagonists. Johnny Cash had a lot to say about sympathy for the murderer, but he doesn’t appear in … Continue reading Country Music For People Who Hate Country Music Part 6: What are we doing? Oh, crime.
. Someone over on r/WriterResearch asked how long a character could survive after a traumatic limb amputation. I had my copy of Blood On The Page handy, so I took a shot at answering. . The chapter on traumatic amputation rates the injury at 5/5 lethality, meaning it will usually be fatal without treatment. . … Continue reading Resource: How long does it take to bleed out from a severed limb?
Dramatic Pause 