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Updates and behind-the-scenes notes from Charlie Forêt.

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Earning the Proposal

Earning the Proposal Romance writers have it easy in one specific way. The proposal is allowed to land. It can be the spine of the book. Everyone bought the book for it. The whole genre is a delivery mechanism for the moment one person asks another person a question and gets the …

7 min read

When the Bullets Are Real

Here’s a problem every writer in deep first person eventually runs into. Your narrator gets ambushed. Or jumped. Or shot at. Suddenly the camera is locked inside a person who can’t pull back, can’t pan, can’t see around the corner — and who, if we’re being honest, can barely see …

7 min read

Book Battles – Ep4

Watch Book Battles on YouTube. Episode 4 (May 2026) **Sci vs Fi has the Ringworld vs. the Disc World. Both franchises present incredbile worlds, but how do the books compare? Something Old features* Red Thunder* by John Varley. It won the Endeavour Award in 2004, and still gets o…

1 min read

Why We All Like Story — What Fiction Does That Nothing Else Can

I was seventeen and it was past midnight and I had school in the morning and the book I was reading — Ender’s Game, borrowed from a friend who’d said “just read it” with the intensity of someone trying to share something they couldn’t explain — had done something to me I didn’t h…

6 min read

When Time Breaks

The problem had a very specific shape, and I found it by running the math. Partway through Book 2 of the Technomancer series, I’d established that one day in the realm of Elysia corresponds to roughly π days on Earth — 3.14 to one. I chose π deliberately: it’s irrational, it neve…

6 min read

New Site, New World, New Stories

Integrationera.com is live. Check it out and let me know what you think. The form you have selected does not exist.

1 min read

Signal Zero – Audio Story

The first story in the An Author’s Voice narrated series is Signal Zero — the beginning of the Integration Era, and a good place to start if you’ve never read it. Sergeant Voss has been guarding an archaeological dig on a frontier world for eleven weeks. His job is straightforwar…

1 min read

The Quiet Apocalypse

Welcome to “An Author’s Voice” where I’ll discuss the craft behind writing and illustrate the points with my own work or discuss other well known examples. Episode Three : The Quiet Apocalypse This post accompanies Episode 3 of An Author’s Voice. If you haven’t listened yet, the …

6 min read

The 14-Chapter Silence: Writing Trauma Without Putting It on the Page

Content Warning: This post discusses the craft of writing sexual assault aftermath in fiction. Here is a scene I chose not to write. It would have been the scene where everything that shapes Elara’s subsequent behavior in Technomancer actually happened — the event that explains h…

6 min read

Signal Zero

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1 min read

A Whole New Universe

I’m excited to announce a new series I’ve started working on called The Integration Era. This will be a Sci-Fi LitRPG series set in the far future. I’ll be posting short stories that form the background of this universe here for subscribers. Sign-up today to gain access to these …

3 min read

Six Voices, Zero Tags: Why Character Voice is Constraints, Not Personality

There’s a test I run on every POV chapter in Technomancer: strip the chapter heading and ask whether the reader can still tell who’s talking. If the answer is no — if the voice could belong to any of the six point-of-view characters — the chapter isn’t ready. Not because the pros…

5 min read