Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

This blog post describes developmental editing services and how they are different from manuscript critiques. The second half covers...

This blog post describes what a manuscript critique, as a paid developmental editing service, involves. It covers whether authors can...

This blog post is packed with tips on how to to navigate the literary magazine space from an editor who writes speculative fiction and...

This blog post is about common story structures used in fantasy fiction, including Save the Cat, the hero’s journey, and the heroine’s...

The marketplace for editorial services can be really confusing, especially to new authors. There’s a lot of bad writing and editing advice...

Third person point of view is a tricky thing to get right. At one end of the scale, you have third person omniscient, with a narrator...

When Heartstopper came out, I had a few conversations with gay men who felt the series was inauthentic – that how the main characters...

Today I want to discuss a toxic idea I’ve seen mentioned on several prestigious creative writing programs and on blog posts by...

From time to time, I receive enquiries from authors who have written a really long novel. I consider really long to be anything over 130K...

Readers connect deeply with characters. Maybe you can remember some of the characters you first connected with as a child or teenager?...

A passive protagonist is one in which the story "happens" to them. Instead of their personality making choices about what course of...

In autumn of 2024, I took the Curtis Brown Creative course Edit and Pitch Your Novel. While I work as a book editor, I attended this...

This blog post covers: The advantages and disadvantages of using a first-person point of view The two main types of first-person point of...

When you create a new fantasy world, it’s worth paying attention to the language and metaphors you use to describe it. The English...

Long before G.R.R. Martin’s take on dragons fanned the flames of controversy (Are they wyverns? Are they dragons? Do we need to know?),...

Many authors find fight scenes notoriously difficult to write. Maybe you just skipped the fight scene chapter until last? Or maybe you...

What if immersive virtual reality technologies existed and were really really good? Better than the real world, in fact? Ernest Cline's...

When telling a story or writing a factual narrative in English, you have two main tenses you can use: present tense and past tense. Here...

Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat! offers a blueprint for screenwriters on how to draft a successful film script. The book draws on his...

In this blog post, I ask H Noss a few questions about gender in worldbuilding. Here are some details about them, and you can find out...