It is Time for the Jedi to End: Several Thousand Words about Star Wars (and a few about Postmodernism)

There's been quite a bit of hubbub about The Last Jedi out there on those internets since even before the movie released. Much has been made of Mark Hamill's misgivings about the direction the story took Luke Skywalker. Based on its Rotten Tomatoes score, critics love the film while audiences (at least audiences motivated to …

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Person-First Language and Designing Characters: An Underdeveloped “A-ha!”

Ask any writer what makes a good story work, and they'll most likely tell you "the characters." Which is only natural. Characters are the people your readers will come to care about--whether they are loved or loathed--at least if you're doing your job as a writer. The wants and needs and struggles of your characters …

Girls are People Too, ya dingus! — or, How Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught me Empathy

As an early twenties male who has been writing fantasy and sci-fi since my early teenage years, I identified strongly with this blog post by Robert Jackson Bennett which I recently encountered through Twitter. The basic gist of it is that many male fantasy and sci-fi writers have a hard time writing female characters because it …