Tag: Writing
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Welcome Back to Babylon
Yuri Yamamoto is back. After two years of self-imposed exile, the disgraced operator turned street samurai has come home to Babylon. Just in time for the country to tear itself apart. The armies of the New Gods are on the march. Monsters in human skin await activation orders. Spies and deniable operatives wage a war…
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Looking Back, Planning Ahead: 2023 Edition
As 2022 draws to a close, I can confidently say that few people would want to live through it again. Certainly I wouldn’t. Though there’s been a let up in the madness since Covid mania gripped the world, we’re a long way off from what we used to call ‘normal’. It may well be that…
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To Write In the World, But Not Of It
When seeking entertainment, people have two contradictory drives: they want novelty, and they also want familiarity. Today, the scale is tipped heavily towards familiarity. Hollywood churns out endless sequels, reboots, remakes, and IPs set in the same universe. Japanese publishers pump out manga and light novels with endless volumes, and release everything from anime adaptations…
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Three Storytellers, Two Listeners, One Story
In his essay ‘The Counterfactual Dialectic’ in Pulp on Pulp, Misha Burnett discusses the use of dialectic to determine what is said to the reader, how it is said, and what the reader will take away from it. I loved the concept so much, I used it for my own work Diary of A Bomoh—with…
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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…