Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers.
Or, The Business of the End of Schlock Mercenary How did Howard start making money from his hobby of drawing and writing comics? How did he self-publish? We have a special guest on this episode! Sandra Tayler—Howard’s wife, the editor and publisher for Schlock Mercenary, and a published author—talks about starting their…
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…
We talk with Howard Tayler about the story structure of a story with a BIG disaster in the middle – one which we don’t recover from until the next book. We also talk about the weight of world-building, how to write for your ideal reader. And Howard considers the question, what…
How do you write the middle of a book? How do you end your book? How do you know what to write next? This week, our hosts —who all work as a writers and publishers (and are sometimes teachers and puppeteers and many other things)— talk through how they have…
Let’s talk about organization! This week, we’re talking about how and what to keep track of— characters, places, names, etc. How do you organize a book? How do you outline a novel? And don’t worry, we dive into the messy question, what is worth keeping track of in your writing? We also…
What can Normal Gossip teach us about foreshadowing and artful storytelling? Thinking about the 20 books that make up Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary, our hosts discuss foreshadowing—our favorite examples, and our go-to tricks for structuring our own work. What does foreshadowing actually do for our work? Do we even need it? Well, yeah… it’s…
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”…
Howard answers questions about “Force Multiplication,” (the 12th Schlock Mercenary book) as posed by Brandon, Dan, and Mary.
“The wind rushed across his skin at several hundred miles per second, and registered as an itch.” Brandon, Dan, and Mary tear into Howard’s two-decade-old manuscript with an eye towards descriptions.
