Category Archives: On Writing

How am I just now learning about the Feanor Did Nothing Wrong memes? For those who don’t know, the story goes a little something like this: So the Valar (kind of like the gods of Middle-Earth, but maybe like archangels … Continue reading →

By now the immediacy of the Barnes and Noble failed experiment of woke-casting classical literature has faded.  These non-troversies rise and fall so fast it can be hard to keep up, so let’s have a quick recap courtesy of Penguin … Continue reading →

January means it’s time for successful authors to start laying the marketing groundwork for the award season. Hard pass. The digital panopticon was supposed to make it easier for the technocrats to fool the rubes.  They see a distopian future … Continue reading →

Writer Daniel J. Davis burst onto my personal scene in 2019 with a string of solid D&D analyses that would have fit right into the earliest days of the OSR.  His post on the post-apocalyptic assumptions built into D&D is … Continue reading →

When they are right, they are right. Before we get to the meat of this post, let’s take a moment to recall the first rule: A quick search for “Scalzi whatever hiatus” takes six seconds and reveals five of the … Continue reading →

Brian Neiemeir over at Kairos has been doing the blog-post convo that we’ve seen so little of since the great Twitter migration.  This time around, he’s doing a deeper delve into a tweet-thread done by Ben Kai Wai Cheah: With … Continue reading →

After an all out brawl – or at least the sort of petty slap fight that passes for such on Twitter – the anti-SJW crews have retreated to their respective corners.  For those not in the know, we aficionados of … Continue reading →

The other day somebody at one of the many renegade publishing internet water coolers asked if the works reviewed over at the Castalia House blog, of which I have done many, are worth reading.  While I can’t speak for all … Continue reading →

Watching Amazon’s The Boys – more on that soonish – reminded me of my last desperate days stuck under the thumb of the Dinosaur Publishers.  Back in the bad old days when I only rarely dipped my toes into NYC … Continue reading →

No that blog title is not a secret story only included on the copy of Cirsova provided to advertisers like me.  It’s just the subject of this blogpost and an admission that I’ve been doing it all wrong. Throughout the … Continue reading →