Writing Excuses

Let's talk commo! How does the ubiquity of communication tech affect your story? How far out of your own experience do you need to step in order to build a culture whose communications are believable?...

29 Aug 201116min

It is Howard's turn in the critique box! Brandon, Dan, and Mary dissect a 21-year-old manuscript from 22-year-old Howard, this time with an eye to making descriptions do more than one thing. Since th...

22 Aug 201116min

Let's talk about some ways in which your descriptions can do more than just describe. You're not just trying to tell us what the room is like. You're also setting the mood, telling us about the POV ch...

15 Aug 201118min

Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. quotient is a concept from his books Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction. M.I.C.E. stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event, and can serve as a wa...

8 Aug 201117min

Microcasting again! The questions we fielded from the Twitterverse include: * How do you hold the whole story in your head when it's a thousand pages long? * What steps do you use when creating a c...

31 Jul 201117min

Agent Sara Crowe joins Dan and Howard again to talk about what an agent does. This simple, off-the-cuff episode offers a nice, inside look into what a literary agent can offer you, your manuscript, an...

25 Jul 201118min

Here's a brainstorming episode in which Brandon throws random concepts from a textbook of his on gods and goddesses, and we attempt to brainstorm a cyberpunk story from these elements. The elements t...

18 Jul 201119min

Cyberpunk: What is it? Why is it? We've mentioned it before, but we've never attempted to tackle it. We begin with an attempt to define cyberpunk (the literary genre), which is typically near-future ...

11 Jul 201116min