Professional Writer = No Day Job?
On a recent episode of the Functional Nerds podcast, Patrick Hester posited that based on the prefix “professional” in “professional writer,” those writers who do not make a living as writers technically don’t count as pros. I’m paraphrasing, of course, so I recommend actually listening to the podcast here (the comment appears around the 30-minute […]
Postcolonialism 101: Misery Tourism (or, How the Genre Community Still Essentializes Africa)
“What is misery tourism?” you might ask. At its most basic, “misery tourism” refers to the ways peoples from wealthy, usually Western nations “tour” the “developing” or “undeveloped” world in order to “learn” something. The process is almost always attached to an assumption of superiority, whether directly acknowledged or buried in the subconscious. To partake […]
Writing Wonders: Are Flashbacks Evil?
I think with all writing concepts, there are no simple answers. Flashbacks are no different. Just as you can ruin a book with poorly constructed multiple POVs, so too can you ruin a book with flashbacks. It all comes down to how and when you do it. Case in point: I am currently reading Tobias […]
Bad Worlds, Bad Language, and Worldbuilding Gone Bad
Recently, I’ve been reading Star Carrier Book One: Earth Strike by Ian Douglas. I was intrigued by the epic military SF setting and decided to plow into it. What begins as a solid piece of action writing, however, quickly dissolves into a linguistic nightmare in the first chapter written from an alien POV. In this […]
First Novels: Are They Forgivable?
While listening to SF Squeecast’s discussion of Kameron Hurley’s novel, God’s War, I was struck by the suggestion that the novel’s perceived faults were forgivable because it is a first novel. Not having read God’s War, I cannot speak to the accuracy of the suggested faults, and therefore cannot directly discuss Hurley’s novel. However, the […]
Not All Editors Are Nice People (or, Some People Live in Imaginary Universes)
I’ve had the pleasure to work with or receive criticism from a number of wonderful people. Lyn Perry of Residential Aliens, for example, is one of the most gracious people who has ever published one of my stories. In fact, when I was rather harsh about the stories in one of his issues last year, […]