Blog

Lord of Light: The Hugo Novel Behind the Argo Cover Story

The Novel Behind the CIA's Fake Movie In 1979, Jack Kirby, the man who drew Captain America and the Fantastic Four, was hired to design the sets for a $50 million science fiction movie. The sets were supposed to become a theme park in Colorado afterward. The movie never got made.…

Vor Game vs Ender's Game

Two Boy Geniuses and an Unlawful Order Put Ender's Game and The Vor Game side by side and the resemblance is almost silly. Both won the Hugo, and both hand military command to an undersized boy years before anyone should. Then they give opposite answers to the same question: what…

The Worldbuilding Template: Sketch a World in 10 Minutes, Then Dig

Worldbuilding is where a lot of us either freeze or drown. We freeze because a blank "describe your world" page gives us nowhere to start. We drown because once we do start, there's no bottom, and you can spend a year on tax law for a country that never appears on the page. The S…

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 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…

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 …

Book Battles – Ep6

Watch Book Battles on YouTube. Episode 6 (July 2026) Sci vs Fi has The Vor Game vs Ender’s Game. Two Hugo Winners, two undersized boy geniuses handed command years too early, and two completely opposite verdicts on the same question: what do you do when the order is wrong? Someth…

Writing YA Fiction

Imagine your whole school can see your stats A sixteen-year-old, one humiliating half second, and the reckless thing he does to prove it wasn’t the whole story. You already know where you rank. Somebody decided years ago, the label stuck, and most days it feels settled. The athle…

OODA Loops by Example

Last time, I argued that revision is an OODA loop, and that the step most writers skip is Orient — the move where you frame what you’ve read against what the passage is actually for, before you change a single word. That’s easy to assert and harder to show. So this dispatch is on…

OODA Loops for Editing

When you’re stuck in rewrite hell — version after version, none of them actually better — the problem usually isn’t your writing skill. It’s something quieter that most writers never name. Most revisions fight themselves. Here’s why. Every working writer has felt the difference b…

In Defense of the Adverb

The adverb prohibition was never a rule. It was a Strunk & White nervous tic that became orthodoxy — and our prose got worse for it. The prohibition isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a real craft problem buried inside it, and the rule was an attempt to solve it. But somewhere between…