TLDR: Real life and real people are ambiguous. If you want your writing to be realistic, be strategic about how you employ ambiguity. We want to breathe life onto the page, make the unreal seem real. In an effort to do so, we often rely on explicit descriptions, leaving no detail to be confused and… Read More BE AMBIGUOUS
In the alternative (or secret) history of China Mieville’s The Last Day’s of New Paris, art is power, literally. Living surrealist artworks roam over post-WWII Parisian cobble, with the Eiffel tower hovering in the distance, its lower-half non-existent. Here, Nazi occult rituals and La Résistance collide in a manner reminiscent of Indiana Jones or Hell… Read More THE ELEPHANT FRAGMENT
Rachel scavenges a post-apocalyptic city, rife with traps, mutated child tribes, and monstrous bears. She searches for food, water, and bio-tech. One day, she comes upon Borne, an enigmatic blob with a taste for lizards, and decides to raise him as her own. What is Borne? Where did he come from? Under the veneer of… Read More REACTIONS: BORNE
Two things. First, my friend Graeme Brown recently published a novella called the Pact. Brown is a prolific world builder and proponent of outlining. He’s taught me that a published book contains only a fraction of an authors efforts. Case in point, Brown keeps stacks of notes detailing every aspect of his built-world, which will never… Read More SPACE JOURNALISM
Over the weekend I attended Winnipeg’s Central Canada Lit Fest, dedicated to all things speculative fiction. The festival catered to writers, with workshops on publishing, marketing, world-building, cover art, query letters, beta reading, and so forth. Here are five of the most informative and surprising things I took note of: 1. The publishing world is not in shambles. The… Read More C4 LIT FEST
HUNTER JOURNAL 