WritingGuillermo del Toro has spent thirty years making monsters into heroes. His advice to writers comes down to nine ideas, from trusting your own voice to giving the villain a real reason. Here they are, with my own take on…
FictionJokes don't count. The most insulting line ever written seriously for the screen is She-Hulk telling Bruce Banner that catcalling and mansplaining make her better at controlling anger. Here's why it fails, and the lines that come close.
FictionMatt Damon's Loki ended up floating in the Mediterranean. The original ended up chained in a cave until the end of the world. How the trickster of Norse myth turned into Wagner's fire god, Marvel's adopted brother and Kevin Smith's…
ObservancesWorld Mental Health Day is October 10, and the 2026 theme asks for lived experience. Here's mine: thousands of hours of therapy looking for what was wrong with me, a late AuDHD diagnosis, and the relief of learning I just…
FictionMost plot holes in a novel are character holes: someone does something only because the author needed them to. Here's how I check finished drafts, using the methods from my Plot Handbook with AI as the checker, not the writer.
WritingPeople say the books we were forced to read in high school were masterpieces we were too young to appreciate. Most of mine were crap, and getting older didn't change that. The few that worked had a story that moved.
FictionPlot armor is the invisible rig that keeps a protagonist alive, lucky and competent because the story needs them. Here are the four kinds readers spot, from wounds that don't count to choices that never cost anything, and how to…
FictionNovelists joke that their characters took over the plot, and the joke is accurate. A character who rejects a planned scene is telling you the outline was written before you knew her.
Artificial IntelligenceThe favorite argument against AI writing is that it has no soul. A one-prompt book has none, but plenty of human writing doesn't either. The soul in writing is the little human parts the author puts on the page.
Artificial IntelligenceAsking whether AI has a soul misses the point, because art itself has no soul. The soul lives in the mind that made the work and the mind receiving it, and Game of Thrones showed how fast an audience feels…
WritingA chapter is as long as one complete thought, and a thousand words is plenty when the thought is finished. Keep with next and real heading styles stop a manuscript from fighting you through every revision.
WritingI write books for a living, and I haven't finished reading one in about five years. The shelf behind me on video calls is set dressing, and the reading I do now comes in pieces, a chapter at a time,…
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