For my “New World” essays on worldbuilding, check out my Patreon page.
Over the years I have posted a great many thoughts on the craft of writing to my blog or various group blogs, or directly to this site; I’ve also written some ebooks on the subject. Those are collated here, grouped into broad categories.
Books | Public Readings from A to Z
Story Structure | Characterization | Writing Women
- New Worlds, Year One: A Writer’s Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding — collecting the first twelve months’ worth of essays from my Patreon project
- New Worlds, Year Two
- New Worlds, Year Three
- New Worlds, Year Four
- Writing Fight Scenes — on the principles and practice of combat in fiction
- Dice Tales: Essays on Roleplaying Games and Storytelling — on the craft of telling stories in an RPG format
- Part One: How Much Should You Read?
- Part Two:What Material Should You Read?
- Part Three: Preparing an Excerpt
- Part Four: Practice
- Part Five: Pacing
- Part Six: Intonation
- Part Seven: Character Voices
- Part Eight: Live Performance
- Part Nine: Digital Performance
- Coda: The Confidence Game
- YouTube playlist of the above essays
- Units of Fiction
- Blood, Love, and Rhetoric
- The Use and Misuse of Prologues
- Love Triangulation
- Flash Fiction: Building an Arch
- Epic Point of View
- It BETTER Not Have Been a Dream
- How to write a long fantasy series
- A Matter of Leverage
- Villains vs. Antagonists
- You wouldn’t like me when I’m strong
- Brown and fit to break bread with
- Undermining the Unreliable Narrator
- Think Before You Kill
- How I Write Female Characters
- Tough Women, and Facsimiles Thereof
- The Value of the Bechdel Test
- A Woman’s Place Is Not in the Refrigerator
- Virgins and Whores
- Home Is Where the Hero Isn’t
- Emasculation Not Required
- First Girl Ever
- The Problem of the Childlike Empress
- Who Mary Sue Isn’t
- The Monstrous Feminine
- The Honorary Male
- T&A on Parade
- Woman =/= Body
- Competence is hot
- Competence is hot, part two
- The Effect She Can Have
- Take It Like a Man
