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Beta Readers Wanted for Technomancer: The Awakened Mage

I've read the second Technomancer book so many times that I can't see it anymore. I know what every scene is supposed to do, so my brain fills in whatever the page leaves out. That's when a book needs new eyes. I'm opening a beta round, and I have room for 12 readers. The book Fi…

Time Travel Books Where Knowing the Future Doesn't Help

You finished one of these and went straight to a search bar. I've done it twice. What you're after is specific: the book where somebody gets the second run we've all privately wished for, walks in carrying everything they know, and finds out the knowing is the problem. Watching t…

The Studio, 2 months later

In July I opened the Studio at charlieforet.com/studio and introduced it with a promise of one post per tool. The Character Template came next. Then the series stopped. Or it might have looked that way. Since then I've written the Workshop posts, on how and why I built my own pla…

The Diplomat Who Walked Around the Horses

On the evening of 25 November 1809, a British diplomat named Benjamin Bathurst stood in the yard of an inn called the White Swan, in the Prussian town of Perleberg, and stepped around the heads of his carriage horses. He didn't come out the other side. Bathurst was going home. He…

The critic at table six

Spice warning.Recipe for Disaster is a contemporary romance, and Part 3 has an explicit, open-door love scene. Parts 1 and 2 are a slow burn. If explicit content isn't for you, Part 2 ends on a clean line and you can stop there. Part 3 carries its own warning at the top. Sloane M…

The Unfinished Problem

I stopped after book one on purpose I read A Game of Thrones around the time the second book came out. Call it 1998. I liked it a great deal, and then I put the series down and walked away from it for good. I'd already been burned by series that sprawled out past their author's a…

The Stack and whether it was worth it

I found a security hole in my own code Back in the second post I told you how I made one codebase run two separate sites, and how proud I was of the test that guards them. A few days after that, I sat down and tried to break my own work on purpose. I found a hole. Not a data spil…

The Hero's Journey as Scaffolding

The hero's journey is scaffolding you build with, then take down The hero's journey is a circle with seventeen stations on it. Ordinary world at the top, then the call, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, all the way around. You've seen the diagram. I've leaned on that circle…

Leaving Wordpress

Easy to move in, terrifying to move out WordPress is simple to start with and frightening to leave. That asymmetry is deliberate. It's the whole shape of lock-in, and it's why the internet is full of people who meant to migrate three years ago and never did. I was one of them. I …

21 Books, Free, Including 7 You've Never Heard Of

Episodes 1 through 7 of Book Battles are now open to everyone. No account, no paywall. That's 21 books and series argued over across 7 episodes. 8 of them have dropped out of the conversation, and those are the ones I'd start with. What Book Battles is Each episode does 3 things …

Readers into Members

The room with the lights off When I audited my own site through a stranger's eyes, the community page said "No activity yet." Zero threads. A forum with nobody in it. That's worse than not having one. An empty community is a shop with the lights off and the door unlocked. A reade…

The Character You Shouldn't Like

Walter White. Amy Dunne. Tyrion at his worst. The Jackal from Red Rising, who I have no business rooting for and root for anyway. You have your own list. And you know the feeling on it: the small private embarrassment of being on someone's side while some other part of you files …