Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
What’s the difference between an obstacle and a complication? Margaret Dunlap takes the lead on this episode for us, giving us the tools we need to create ‘impediments to main character progress’ which will drive our stories across page turns (and commercial breaks) in compelling, twisty ways.
Credits:This episode was recorded by Daniel Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, and Julia Rios
Julia Rios joins us to talk about writing characters who come from one of the many Latin-American cultures or subcultures. “Latinx” is a catch-all term for people with Latin-American heritage, including mixed-race people. In this episode we talk about mash-up cuisine, intersectionality, and how to navigate the subtleties to find the specific cultural elements which will help you create Latinx characters.
Credits:This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
When we say “without rules” we’re talking about stories whose magic is not held under logical scrutiny for the reader. There are lots of reasons why you might do this, and in this episode we’ll talk about not just about the why, but also the how.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson
Let’s design magic systems! We talk about how we do it, and how the principles of magic system design apply to the science fiction systems we create, and vice-versa.
NOTE: In this episode we’re talking about “hard” magic systems, where there are well-defined rule sets (even if the reader isn’t shown them explicitly.) Next week we’ll talk about “soft” magic.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Let’s infodump without infodumping. Let’s deliver lots of exposition without sounding expository. Let’s talk with the maid and the butler without having maid-and-butler dialog.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Benjamin Hewett, and mastered by Alex Jackson
