The human mind is an astonishingly, perhaps incomprehensibly complicated entity, and there is absolutely a capacity for it to malfunction; however, the only tool we have to diagnose it is...the human mind, which is as fallible as it is amazing.
Essay Arguments
In school, you were probably taught three types of essays: narrative essays, expository essays, and persuasive essays.
Marriage in Speculative Fiction
Love and marriage, as the Frank Sinatra song tells us, go together like a horse and carriage, and while I by no means desire to disparage the institute, that might be a problem when it comes to writing speculative fiction.
Sympathetic Nature
That single, two-word sentence sent me along a tangent about the role and purpose of imagery and sympathetic nature in writing, and why certain concepts, like that of lightning flashing, have such a powerful, dramatic effect on a scene.
Failing Writing Aliens
I wanted to dedicate a post to a specific aspect of writing science fiction: writing aliens. Or, as the title more accurately asserts, failing to write aliens.
Why I Don’t Outline
Considering my general temperament and proclivities in other aspects of my life, you might expect me to be an outliner. Except…I’m not. Not at all.
Revising Memories
His specific claim, “this finding led to the idea that ACSS2 could be involved in unwanted memory formation,” was what set off my internal alarm bells.
Effect and Cause
A recent Writing Excuses episode to which I listened discussed the ideas of disordered storytelling, and means of writing stories that are intended to be read in an order other than from the first page to the last page. Unfortunately, it didn't really dig into the topic the way I hoped it would engage with it.
Common Law
In legal theory, common law and statutory law are the two primary forms of rulemaking in a given legal framework: statutory law being the explicitly written laws of legislatures, executives, and bureaucrats, and common law being laws derived from judicial precedent and from the implications of the shared moralistic and political environment.
Schlock Mercenary Study
When I noticed recently that he had officially finished the comic, I decided to give it another try, and this time I got through it. I got through all of it, one comic at a time, twenty years’ worth of them. It is epic scale storytelling in a short, web comic format.
