Bringing you stories, book and game reviews, writing tips, and updates from author S.G. Baker.
An abusive husband hunts down his hard-of-hearing wife and corners her in her mother’s barn. With the help of her hearing guide dog, she must face off against him when he opens fire on them both, threatening to drag her back to the home she escaped.
Writers get burned out. Maybe now more than ever. Hustle culture for writers comes with all the struggle—late nights, weekends, and maintaining an online presence squeezed in around a day job, family, and health—with very little of the reward that should come with hustling. In fact, a 2018 Author's Guild survey shows the median American author income in 2017 had dropped to an annual salary of $6,080.
Yikes on bikes, that's bad.
Heated debate rampages across the online writing community as to which dialogue tag is morally, ethically, and mechanically correct to use: 'said' or one of its many synonyms. Use all the alternatives! Never deviate from 'said!' A great way to get (angry, rageful) interaction on Twitter is to ask the writing community which to use.
We average writers get caught in the middle. We just want to know the answer so we can keep writing, not start a flame war between influencer titans. We get mixed results, however, because the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In the mix of both.
Let's talk about what that means.
This assessment of the gameplay mechanics in Ori and the Will of the Wisps comes from a player who dislikes making mechanics choices. From leveling trees to deploying finite resources, I would just rather not. Yet Ori and the Will of the Wisps manages to incorporate both of my weaknesses and for this reason, I bounced off this game almost at once. Despite my love for the first game, Ori and the Blind Forest. Despite my being excited enough to pre-order the game.
But two years later, I came back and loved it.
Let me explain why.
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree is a cozy fantasy that explores the NPC side of adventure fantasy. The narrative follows Viv, a successful barbarian-class orc mercenary who dares to ask how life could be different if she hung up her sword and brought something new to the world. Deciding to open an obscure business known as a 'café,' Viv relies on a magical item of good luck to lead her to the perfect location for her shop and to bring exactly the right people into her life for success.
Writing advice often relates to the same two topics: show, don't tell and write in the active voice. So, say you're taking on these two nuggets of wisdom. You're ready to incorporate the advice you keep getting from your critique partner(s) and your writing group! You've learned everything you need to know about how to change passive voice into active voice and how to show rather than tell. Yet, even though you've made certain to use verbs that aren't being verbs and you've incorporated adjectives as descriptors, your writing still feels clunky. It's still getting dinged at your critique group meetings.
This is because oops! in trying to fix one problem, you've introduced a new problem. And that's the use of filter words and filter phrases in your writing.
I've spent the past few weeks working out an ending to the Hopeful Wanderer web series. By ending, I mean a very cool ending that reveals all the little things I've teased about the Wanderer.
Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea winks at the contrast between the perception of agency within the main character of a video game and that of a novel. Bioshock, a 2007 first-person shooter, interrogates the same question of agency through the main character of a video game.
The title of "my favorite video game" has long been held by Beyond Good and Evil, but it's been a month since I finished Outer Wilds, and I think... this might be my new favorite game. At least top three. This article won't be a video game review so much as a wild romp through annotating the parts that interest me. There will be spoilers. Brace for impact.
An exclusive, never-posted tale about our intrepid Hopeful Wanderer graces the pages of Texas High Plains Writers' most recent anthology — With Words We Weave 2022: Hope. A spiritual sequel to one of the web series flash fictions, "Occlusion" pits the Wanderer against an old, vengeful foe as their blood and everyone else's starts draining … Continue reading Book Release — With Words We Weave 2022: Hope
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