A fantasy story I was reading recently which featured an alternative world setting and so forth, happened to mention war crimes. It presented this as natural and expected, except that the world-building did not support it.
Powered by Limits
It's why authors should spend more of their time thinking about limitations than capabilities, because that's where they'll find the most interesting stories.
Always Another Story
You can submit to rejection and feedback without these being critiques of yourself, rather than just your story, because there will always be another story.
Post Post-Scarcity
The answer to our human ills does not lie with limitless energy or a post-scarcity society. If anywhere, it lies within us.
Patterns and Poetry in Prose
With poetry remaining, for now, something of a mystery, I've turned my attention towards instead applying certain poetically derived techniques to my prose.
Showing the Word Budget
I think of word limits as budgets. I have some number of words with which to tell my story, and I cannot spend more than that number.
What is Time?
It is first necessary to establish what, precisely, is being asked by that question, since most casual answers are actually responding to the perceived question ‘how is time measured,’ and not to the actual question ‘what is time’.
A story of Conflict
When I try to write stories and they don’t work, I’m increasingly seeing that the common thread is that they lack a sufficient, permeating conflict.
What Makes a Classic?
There will necessarily be changes to the list of classics from time to time, and doubtless many factors must contribute to making a book a 'classic', but we should be able to come up with a rigorous definition that will endure. To do that, we need to understand what we're even trying to accomplish by categorizing something as 'classic.'
Reality-Proximal Storytelling
If we take the complete, whole-cloth invention of a new world as one extreme, and reality-proximal stories set firmly in our world as the other, then what I'm interested in talking about today is the middle ground.
IGC Publishing 