Culture
Blog posts for your entertainment and information.
How The Abominable Dr. Phibes and A Clockwork Orange resist — and reward — the great outline templates, with Save the Cat retro-fitted three ways
They Cloned Tyrone vs. The Brother From Another Planet: A Save the Cat Comparison of Two Black Urban Dystopian Science Fiction Films
Why “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” Bypasses Save the Cat
Sword and Soul: The Genre That Walked Africa Out of the Margins and Into Myth
Writing Cinematically
Online Communities for Dystopian Fiction Writers and the Readers Who Love the Dark
19 Free Ways to Benefit from Independent Book Publishers Association Membership
18 Writing Skills Every Author Needs
The Dystopian Fiction That is Closest to Today
Three Dystopian Fiction Apocalypses, Three Answers: Station Eleven, The Last of Us, and The Walking Dead as Parable, Partition, and Mirror
The Virginia Author’s Guide to Virginia Writing Groups and Critique Circles
Origin Stories and Resulting Opus Issues
How Masters of Speculative Fiction Built Structured Short Story Collections
Flow State and the Faithful Routine: How the Masters Sustained Daily Practice Without Burning Out
How Narrative Storytelling Crowns — and Crushes — Political Campaigns
Infinite Earths, Infinite Stories: What Marvel and DC’s Multiverses Teach Speculative Fiction Novelists About Building Boundless Worlds
The Informant Problem: Why Betrayal Is Dystopian Fiction’s Most Devastating Structural Move
How Podcast Guesting Can Launch an Author Career: The Microphone as Megaphone
Speculative Fiction as Social Mirror, Message, and Mechanism: Five Case Studies
The Word as World: A Definitive Guide to the Life and Work of Samuel R. Delany
The Ones Who Won’t Let Go: The Literary Science of the Enduring Series Protagonist
The Flesh Betrays: A Definitive Guide to Body Horror Fiction
American Nightmares: The Near-Future Dystopia as Political Warning, from Bradbury to Butler to the Present
No One Will Sing Songs in Our Memory: A Definitive Guide to Grimdark Fantasy
Where the Buzzards Circle and the Devil Deals: A Definitive Guide to Weird Western Fiction
Welcome to the Borderlands: A Definitive Guide to the New Weird
Be Seeing You: The Prisoner, Genre Alchemy, and the Village We Now Call Home
The Shape of a Plant, the Soul of a Story: How Alan Moore Resurrected Swamp Thing and Invented the Dark Hero
Afrofuturism: Black Futures, Ancient Roots, and the Art of Imagining Liberation
Octavia Butler and the Science Fiction of Survival
Solarpunk: The Genre That Dares to Dream the World Repaired
Neil Gaiman’s Mythmaking
Philip K. Dick’s Writing Style
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Writing Style
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Style
The Science Fiction Author’s Guide to Building a Platform That Actually Works
What Does a Science Fiction Author Actually Do?
How to Become a Science Fiction Author — What Nobody Tells You
55 Essential Science Fiction Books That Forged the Genre
What “One Grain of Sand” Means
Sisters, Loss, and the Female Bond
Memory and Forgetting As Political Acts
Grief as a Structural Force
Complicity in Dystopian Fiction
Ten Dystopian Novels Every Fan of the Genre Should Read and Why
20 Story Structure Frameworks: The Complete Guide for Fiction Writers
Utopian Dystopias in Literature
Dystopian Fantasy: When the Dark Kingdom Is the System