I've seen plenty of writers go from optimistic world builders to burned-out self-doubters time and time again. The story keeps changing, the world keeps expanding, and the story never comes together. I've been there myself. Recently I overcame a personal hurdle that got in the way of my fiction writing. Non-fiction comes easily to me but fiction is elusive for some reason. In place of my old stumb... » Continue Reading
I've seen plenty of writers go from optimistic world builders to burned-out self-doubters time and time again. The story keeps changing, the world keeps expanding, and the story never comes together. I've been there myself. Recently I overcame a personal hurdle that got in the way of my fiction writing. Non-fiction comes easily to me but fiction is elusive for some reason. In place of my old stumb... » Continue Reading
There are two ways that people deal with impossibly bad news; nihilism and escapism. Look at the cyberpunk genre. It started as a caricature of the politics, wars, corporate greed, and rising technologies of the 1980s and 19990s. It was an attempt to give a face to the dread that lurked behind every technological advance or world-changing event. Now cyberpunk has become a silent admission that we... » Continue Reading
Time has never been on our side. We never know when the end will come for us, for our loved ones, even for our enemies We are blindly walking a path through life never knowing when we'll run out of rope. Would we act differently if we knew today was the last for us? What do we leave behind? How are we remembered? What legacy or change do we amount to? It feels like people only worry about these q... » Continue Reading
If you go back 100 years the possibility of coming up with an idea that nobody had ever thought of before. Now we have so many books, comics, games, tv shows, movies, and ideas that being original feels impossible. Every genre, trope, and concept has some sort of existing attempt at telling a similar story. I can't even describe a new movie to someone without hearing "oh so it's just x + y but dif... » Continue Reading