Studies
Deep Dive
I spent 100+ hours hand-tagging the speaker for each and every line of dialogue in A Song of Ice and Fire. Just one piece of a shockingly in-depth look at this series.
Puzzling out my love of the game.
Deep Dive
A nuts and bolts look at the prose techniques of the always impressive M. John Harrison.
A crash-course in ludology as it applies to storytelling.
A technical study of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians that is 44% as long as the text itself.
Exploring the psychology that powers every suit of power armor you can name, plus 90% of all war stories ever told.
Lab Notes
The fundamental belief that led us to invent deus ex machina and Chekhov's gun.
Why didn't Asteroid City feel like a COVID movie to me?
To make a flashback exciting, stick your character in a chrysalis.
How do writers use color in fiction? Who uses a lot of it? Who uses just a little?
To satisfy the voracious fantasy reader, you'll need to put out a big spread.
You don’t want your protagonist to be the center of the universe. I look at Station Eleven to explain why.
Notes on A Quiet Place.
How do you go about telling a story no one wants to hear?
Many critics are too cowardly to review a movie they haven’t seen. But when the red ball arrives, I must respond.
One of the subtler "oh shit" moments in Breaking Bad.
A clever dungeon master's trick.