Category: The Writer’s Craft
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Draw From A Deeper Well
“This is just like [Brand X]!” This is the most common sentence in modern fiction. It is also the most annoying sentence in modern fiction. Every time I encounter it in a story, I always roll my eyes, shake my head, and ignore the sentence. And usually the following paragraph too. Every reference to contemporary…
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GameLit: Not Just Written Games
Gamelit / LitRPG is one of the hottest literary genres on the market. It attempts to replicate the gaming experience in written form, taking the tropes of role-playing games and reproducing them on the page. As a reader and a gamer, the genre ought to be in my alley. And yet… it is the opposite.…
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How to Not Lose Money From Self-Publishing
Singaporean author John Lim wrote an article on TODAY describing the challenges he faced as a self-published author. Being a self-published author myself, I sympathise with his situation. With that said, he made the kind of mistakes that the successful self-pubbed author cannot afford to make. I am Singapore’s first Hugo and Dragon Award nominated…
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A Higher Level of Horror
Over the past month, I was on a horror kick. Aligned with my current work on the Babylon universe, I read stories that occupied the intersection of horror, science fiction and a touch of fantasy. Some were written by up-and-comers, others were penned by Big Names in the traditional (and now indie) space. At the…
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The Page is Not The Game
The video game is the defining entertainment medium of the times. Combining high-impact visuals, immersive sound and deep player engagement, all within the comfort of the player’s home, the video game is the epitome of technological leisure. Its influence bleeds out into other media. In writing, we see this in the immensely popular LitRPG /…
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Ingredients of Action Horror
Action horror. A fiction contradiction if there ever was one. Action stories are about agency: the character’s ability to act on the environment, to overcome all odds, to destroy all foes in his path. Horror relies heavily on a lack of agency: the inability to directly confront the horror, and with it, the despair that…