FaithEaster can fall anywhere across a thirty-five day window, and the rule that decides it involves a fictional moon. The calculation occupied European mathematics for centuries, it is the reason Orthodox and Western Easter usually differ, and it causes genuine…
Fiction WritingTwenty horror films for people who believe they do not like horror. Almost none are gore, most contain no monster worth the name, and several are among the best films ever made in any genre. Ranked gentlest to hardest so…
ChristmasTwenty Christmas films ranked, including several that are genuinely bleak, one about an attempted suicide, one about a family destroying each other over the English crown, and one nobody thinks of as a Christmas film despite every scene being lit…
Fantasy FictionLe Guin grew up in a house of anthropologists and applied their central question to places that did not exist: not what a society has, but why it arranged itself that way. That order of operations is why her worlds…
ComedyWilde produced a body of work you could read in a fortnight, and he is quoted more than writers with forty books. The reason is mechanical, not mystical: he built the surprise into the sentence instead of the paragraph, and…
Gothic HorrorRice wrote 37 books that sold over 150 million copies, and the reason she matters to anyone studying craft comes down to one decision made in a short story around 1968. She moved the camera and gave the vampire the…
AdaptationStoker managed a London theater for twenty-seven years and wrote Dracula in the evenings. It became the most adapted novel in the language, and almost nobody who invokes it has read it, which means almost nobody knows its central technique…
AmericaTwain invented an American voice for prose by writing the way people spoke, went bankrupt backing a typesetting machine, outlived most of his family, and produced late work so bleak his estate suppressed parts of it. The cheerful figure on…
AugustLovecraft sold to pulp magazines for a fraction of a cent per word and died at forty-six in poverty, having invented the only genuinely new horror idea of the twentieth century. He was also a racist by the standards of…
JanuaryAsimov published around five hundred books across nine of the ten Dewey categories, wrote science fiction whose plots are almost entirely arguments, and invented a set of rules whose whole purpose was to break interestingly. He also never knew his…
AdaptationAusten published four novels anonymously, earned a few hundred pounds from all of them, and died at forty-one. She also perfected the technique most modern fiction runs on, and almost nobody who reads her for the romance notices it happening.
DialogueHemingway built a prose style out of omission and spent thirty years being imitated badly by people who copied the short sentences and missed the method. The technique is learnable. The imitations fail because they reproduce the surface and skip…
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