Last week a chart made the rounds, ranking the Presidents since Reagan on spending. Look at Reagan. That happy man is a freaking profligate. Obama, on the other hand, heck, he’s doing better than Bill Clinton. Except there are a few problems. First, I can’t tie this data out to the official CBO numbers. Second,
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The best way to change someone’s mind: use the skills you learned writing fiction. John Scalzi recently wrote a post about White Privilege. You know: the idea that Straight White Males (SWMs) have all the cards stacked in their favor. It’s called “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” I assume he wrote it
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Back when Orson Card first started his online magazine Intergalactic Medicine Show, he wrote an essay in which he detailed how he developed the idea for one of the short stories he told in his Ender universe. Card’s essay is a valuable resource because he exposes his mental thought process, modeling how he approaches story development. It’s not often that
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So how do writers use questions in their story development? Let’s hear first from Ian Creasey, whose short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales, and has been reprinted in several Year’s Best SF anthologies. His excellent collection Maps of the Edge was published last year. Stories Are Made
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I realized I needed to blather a bit more on this topic to warn you against something before I bring the other authors on. You’re going to be tempted. You’re going to be tempted to seek for some Holy Grail list of magic development questions. Some of you are going to be tempted to compile some big old
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