Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
To celebrate Mary Robinette’s birthday today (!!), she is taking us inside the craft (and emotional engine) of her short story “With Her Serpent Locks,” using it as a case study in beginnings, control, and creative “leveling up.” Our hosts dig into grounding the reader through myth, pattern, and delayed information, and…
All unreliable narrators aren’t unreliable in the same way. How do they differ and how does that change the way that we write them? Erin shares her unified theory (look at the graphic below!) of unreliable narrators. Homework: Take an event that you’re familiar with, and write about it as…
What does it mean if your writing is voice-y? How do you give your character a natural voice? We approach this question from the high-level perspective of craft, and the granular level of word choice and sentence structure. Erin talks about the research she did about Appalachian English for her…
If you write short stories or enjoy speculative fiction, this episode is for you. Our host Erin Roberts has written short stories, interactive fiction, and has built worlds for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). For the next 8 episodes, we’ll be diving into three of her short stories. This week, Erin…
Deep Dive: Sergeant In Motion How do you write an ending to a book? How do you finish something you’ve been writing for over 20 years? Howard Tayler talks to us about writing the ending to his serialized webcomic and space opera, Schlock Mercenary. We dive into how to write a…
Deep Dive: A Function of Firepower How do you write the middle of a book? How do you write an ending to a story? For this week’s episode about writing, we focus on Book 19 of Schlock Mercenary, the penultimate book in Howard Tayler’s series. We discuss ways to make…
The first episode in our eight-episode Deep Dive into Howard’s weekly webcomic strip, Schlock Mercenary. We grill Howard on how he taught himself to draw, why he decided to self-publish (hint: his wife, Sandra Tayler, helped him), and how he managed to write an ending. Homework: The “How it should have ended”…
The team grills Dan on his audio-only book “Dark One: Forgotten,” which he co-wrote with Brandon Sanderson. We find out how he wrote a book that became a six-part audio series, and why exactly that form is important. *Please listen to “Dark One: Forgotten” before listening to this episode!*. Homework:…
Spoiler Alert! This week is our deep dive into Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man. It’s a sci-fi mystery novel often described as “The Thin Man in space.” Deep dive episodes are necessarily full of spoilers because we ask all kinds of how and why questions specific to the writing of…
