When Your Memoir Should Be a Novel
September 19, 2026
Every chapter is addressed to four people who will never read it. That is when I suggest we write it as a novel, change the names, and move the industry.
Tag: Fiction
Fiction is the trade this site is built on. This tag collects reviews, craft pieces and fiction of my own, from short work to novels, with the working questions attached.
Critical ThinkingToba: The Winter That Almost Ended Us
September 6, 2026
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
FictionThe Office Block Where the Bedrooms Are
September 3, 2026
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
FictionBehind the Book: The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo
September 2, 2026
A friend has a violin tattooed across her back. That is the entire origin, and the story has nothing to do with her. I wanted to know who would choose that image.
FictionBehind the Book: Gettin’ Laid
September 1, 2026
This one came from nowhere in particular. Written by the inkblot method: drop one concept, drop others near it, write outward from each, and wait for the story islands to join.
Character DevelopmentThe Solar System Is an Energy Problem
August 31, 2026
Settling the solar system is not a distance problem. It is an energy problem, a radiation problem, a gravity problem, and above all a supply chain problem, and the one that decides everything gets the least attention.
Character DevelopmentVerne Built a Shared Universe and Broke His Own Timeline
August 28, 2026
Jules Verne wrote three novels across eight years that turn out to be one story, with returning characters, honoured consequences, and a timeline that does not add up.
Character DevelopmentTen Thousand Hours of Beads
August 25, 2026
Deliberate human burial goes back at least a hundred thousand years. At Sungir, two children were buried with ten thousand ivory beads, each about an hour of work, by people living at the edge of their food supply.
Character DevelopmentThe Beach at the End of Time
August 22, 2026
H. G. Wells sent a traveller thirty million years forward to a beach under a swollen red sun where the last living thing flopped in the surf. That ending was not invention. It was the settled physics of 1895.
Character DevelopmentForty Years of Cases Nobody Explained
August 19, 2026
A psychiatrist at the University of Virginia spent four decades collecting cases of small children who described lives they had not lived, including 210 whose birthmarks matched wounds on the person they claimed to have been.
Character DevelopmentAndromeda Might Miss Us After All
August 13, 2026
The settled answer was a head-on collision in four billion years. In June 2025 a hundred thousand simulations turned that into a coin flip. Almost nothing will physically collide when it happens, because stars are too far apart. What changes…
Character DevelopmentAD 69: The Year Rome Had Four Emperors
August 10, 2026
In the twelve months of AD 69 Rome had four emperors and three of them died violently. Around forty thousand men died in a single afternoon at Bedriacum, Romans on both sides, and the empire learned something it never unlearned.