All Updates
Every story, chapter, and update — in order of release.
Book Battles - Episode Seven
Sci vs Sci The Dresden Files vs Murderbot Diaries Two of the most beloved narrators in modern genre fiction are dangerous, wildly competent, allergic to sincerity, and desperate to be left alone. One is a wizard. The other is a machine. Neither one gets its wish. Harry Dresden, J…
The New Character Template
The Character Template: Build a Character You Can Come Back To Every writer has a graveyard of half-finished character sheets. Mine used to live in Word documents named things like char_notes_FINAL_v3.docx. The template was fine. The problem was everything around it: no consisten…
Introducing the Studio
Craft Tools Accessible from Anywhere Most of the tools we lean on as writers live somewhere else. The character sheet is a Word doc in a folder we forget the name of. The worldbuilding notes are scattered across three apps. The "read it out loud and catch the lumps" pass happens …
The Writing Resources Page
I keep my working craft notes on one page of this site. It's called Writing Resources, and reaching it costs nothing but a free account. I mean the actual notes. The template I fill in before I name a character. The ten-part slog I went through to build a believable world for my …
Why I Built a Platform
I stopped renting my readers Last spring I clicked the most important button on my own website and hit a locked door. The button said "Read Free Stories." I'd put it front and center, the thing I most wanted a new reader to press. I pressed it myself, pretending to be a stranger.…
Acceptable Losses
Perfect for readers of character-driven military science fiction who love the moral command dilemmas of David Weber's Honor Harrington and the crucible academies of Ender's Game.
The Integration Era
Imagine a world where everyone is watched, judged, and rated... Welcome to the Integration Era. Just over a century ago, on an uninspiring planet just inside the forward edge of mankind's expansion to the stars, an alien installation was discovered. The world was barely habitable…
Writing Resources
A Collection of free, downloadable resources for writers. Want something added to this collection? Ask a question and we'll build an FAQ together Visit the Studio for free online tools Online Character Template Online World Building Template Manuscript review tool (identify issue…
Chapter Endings as Contracts
A chapter ending is a contract. Most writers sign it without reading. Every working writer has had this talk with a beta reader. The pacing felt off in the middle, they say. You ask which chapter. They can't point to one. So you go back and revise the chapters in that range. You …
Technomancer
Technomancer Elara crossed dimensions with a dark mage's compulsion sealed into her soul — find the technomancer, hold him, and let the magic drag them both back. She has no choice. She never did. Finn Miller has been running from the NSA since he weaponized their own quantum sur…
Another Past Trilogy
A Second Chance, Measured in Decades Paul Taylor died at sixty-five. A brilliant physicist, he had changed the world and somehow missed the parts of it worth changing it for. Then a fusion accident in 2033 ended his first life — and he woke on a summer morning in 1979, fourteen y…
Book Battles - Episode Six
Sci vs Sci The Vor Game vs Ender’s Game Two Hugo winners, two undersized boy geniuses handed command years too early, and two completely opposite verdicts on the same question: what do you do when the order is wrong? Orson Scott Card's Ender Wiggin and Lois McMaster Bujold's Mile…
Book Battles - Episode Five
Sci vs Fi Red Planet vs Red Mars Forty-three years separate these two Mars novels, but the real distance between them is a single afternoon. On July 14, 1965, Mariner 4 spent twenty-five minutes photographing the Martian surface and beamed back twenty-one images that ended the Lo…
Book Battles - Episode Four
Sci vs Fi Ringworld vs Disc World Larry Niven and Terry Pratchett both built impossible worlds on the page and dared readers to believe in them. Niven's Ringworld is an act of engineering faith: a structure 186 million miles in diameter, mathematically plausible, physically deman…
Book Battles
Welcome to Book Battles Science fiction and fantasy have been arguing with each other, and with us, for over a century. Book Battles is a monthly series that leans into that argument: each episode pits two genre legends head-to-head, rescues a forgotten classic from undeserved ob…
Book Battles - Episode One
Sci vs Fi Lord of The Rings vs Dune J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert crafted two of the most influential speculative fiction worlds—Middle-earth and Arrakis—but their philosophies couldn’t have been more different. Tolkien, deeply rooted in Catholicism and mythological tradition,…
Book Battles - Episode Two
Sci vs Fi Dragonriders of Pern vs. Game of Thrones Here's something that should settle a few arguments: Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern is not actually fantasy. The dragons of Pern were genetically engineered from native fire-lizards by a colony geneticist named Kitti Ping …
Book Battles - Episode Three
Sci vs Fi The Hunger Games vs Harry Potter Both series sold hundreds of millions of copies and turned their protagonists into archetypes that show up everywhere now. But the philosophies underneath them couldn't be more different, and the contrast starts at the origin stories. J.…