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Witch's Brew

The Witch's Brew The shop wasn't there yesterday. Ethan has walked past that stretch of sidewalk a hundred times: the vape store, the dead Blockbuster, the empty gap between them. Tonight the gap has a door, and the door is open, warm light spilling onto the concrete. A hand-pain…

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…

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 Chapter You Can't Write

The Chapter You Can't Write Every craft podcast tells you to push through. On this, every craft podcast is wrong. Or to be fair: right about half the time, badly wrong the other half. And nobody teaches you which half you're in. Most working writers have lived the bad version. A …

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…

Naming as Theme

A few episodes ago, I told you about a moment in a short story I wrote called “Signal Zero.” A military sergeant gets ambushed by an alien intelligence — and inside that ambush, the system gives him a designation. It calls him Sentinel. And next to Sentinel, a number: Frame: Seve…

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 …

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 …