THE GOLDEN AGE (~2009-2019)
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After college and entering the workforce, things definitely changed for a bit, but not as much as I expected at first. My first desk job— working the drive thru at a bank— actually gave me bits and pieces of time to crank out words. If things were slow and my drawer was in good shape, there was nothing really to do. It was in this time period that I first discovered NaNoWriMo and put out my first novel. (The REALLY bad one). 

Honestly, I can safely say that 2009-2019 was, so far, my golden age of writing. I was cranking out thousands of words most days. I definitely hit my first million words somewhere in there… my guess would be around 2013, if not earlier, honestly. I’ve never calculated and couldn’t if I wanted to. But I’d say definitely by then, I was well and truly past a million words.

It was my job after I left the bank that really blossomed things, and that happened in the middle of 2011. I started working at a call center, and it had… amenities. A cafeteria, a very nice on-site employee gym with showers, a “relaxation room” with a couple couches and a white noise machine. It was honestly kinda like being on campus again. I practically lived there for seven years. I also got into the best shape of my life… briefly… until work stress stole it from me. 

But I digress. By this time, I had a laptop and a lot of habits. I’d get up at, no kidding, 4:15 in the morning, drive the 50ish minutes to the call center to get a good parking spot and be there when the gym opened at 5:30. I’d get in at least an hour workout, get a shower, and have breakfast, all usually before 7 or 7:15. My work shift usually was 8-5 or 9-6, so the rest of that time was my writing time. 

Even better was when I got a promotion that took me to a different department, OFF the phones. It was still busying work, but this gave me the freedom to listen to music while I processed things, and my playlists got old pretty quick (this was in the days of iPods). So I started seeking other audio input. I found podcasts, podiobooks, and eventually audiobooks. Many podcasts I listened to were fiction based or about writing, and I eventually started one of my own that ran from 2014-2020, The Melting Potcast (RIP).

It was also somewhere in here that I had multiple 10,000+ word days. I almost had a 20,000-word day, but… that was a rough day. 

And the words were not that great. It was in here where… well, I’ve talked about NaNoWriMo before and what it taught me. I switched to quality over quantity in here.

In 2016, I got ANOTHER promotion to another offline department, and this was one that was even less work-intense. It was a monitoring hub for a bunch of nationwide call center departments, and unless there was a crisis going on, there was actually little to do. A lot of my coworkers spent their time reading, studying for certifications, all kinds of stuff. 

I generally did this: first couple hours, writing. I usually had some sort of goal: a chapter or two, a plot point, editing, something like that. Once I got through it… I usually started chainmailing, because it was in 2015 that that craft finally came barreling into my life. I was still cranking out a good thousand words on a good day. It was also during this time that most of my published works came out: Starsigns, Criminal From Birth, and The Deadly Studies being the most notable.

In early 2018, I got the bad news: the call center was closing. It was going to be relocate, take a BIG demotion and go back on the phones in a different department (but at a call center closer to home), or take severance.

I took severance. I lost my gym, my power naps, and all the easy writing time I’d been enjoying for the last few years. It was… very different, I’ll say. 

June was a lot more wild than I expected.
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Short Story (working title “Recalled”) - Officially on the back burner. I put what I have so far up on here. I won’t be tracking this story anymore.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. It’s been rough. Still mulling over the title.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Chapter one rewrite is done, and first shot at chapter two is done and it’s ready to be rewritten. Chapter one ended at 3266, and chapter two is at 1199, so I did 3229 words for the month.

June’s schedule got insane again rather unexpectedly. Not complaining. It was really good. July is the last wild month I SHOULD have through the end of the year. Some travel days will be cutting into my writing time, so there’s that to worry about. But August does bring back D&D time, so there will be that too.

What I’ve been working on has been good though. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, right?

Collaboration Project - I need to get in touch with my author friend and get working on this.

I know I promised my review of Parade of Horribles right after This Inevitable Ruin but my best friend has just started reading the books and I'm keeping pace with them and won't read PoH until they do. It'll come when we've both read it! 

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I’ve been a fan of Ready Player One for well over a decade. The book more than the film, though I absolutely did enjoy the film! It’s not perfect, but it’s at least fun. 

Cline’s Armada I consumed some years ago too, when it was new. I was less impressed by it and have only read it the once, whereas RPO I listen to probably every year or so.

It was because of my experience with Armada that I was hesitant to read Ready Player Two when I first learned about it. I wasn’t worried about disappointment so much as I just didn’t feel the strong impetus to read it. I was happy to let it be and sort of wait to hear general impressions of it. Then I just sort of… forgot about it altogether. 

Until late December 2025, when a friend I trust (and now I don’t even remember who) said to give it a listen anyway. So I did.

I have very mixed feelings about it. As I finished listening to it this morning (It’s Dec 31 2025 as I write this) I figured out how to condense into a single sentence how I felt about it:

This book demonstrates the difference between the journey and the destination, and while Ready Player One was more about the journey, this one struck me as more about the destination.
So now, let me try to explain what I mean. 

I first read RPO in 2014 and fell in love. The book was a love letter exploring tons of pop culture spanning from the 1970s into the 1990s, all experienced through a massive scavenger/Easter egg hunt inside a video game. Everything was about finding the next clue, then solving it to get the solution, then executing the solution. We had the added stress of the evil corporate entity fighting alongside, a rival faction who wanted the prize for their own reasons that would ruin the paradise that was the OASIS. Spoiler alert: by the end of the book, the good guys win. Ready Player One was about the journey to find the egg, and it was over. With the hunt complete and the main character basically being omnipotent, immortal, and all-powerful inside the game, I didn’t really see any point in there being a sequel. While I wanted more, I was content with it.

Ready Player Two, as I said, was more about the destination than the journey. We pick up after the contest ended, get some updates on how things changed, and get some new technology to experience the OASIS. Then, we get the new quest, a quest only for Wade, the  winner of the previous contest and new overlord of the OASIS. He’s still got his friends Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis inside and outside the game, helping run the company.

And here’s where my first gripe about the book comes: even though things get hinted at a lot about what’s to come, it’s a good quarter of the way through the book before we really get any sort of actual quest progress. We really only sort of hear about it before then. The first 25 percent of the book is largely exposition, a combination of “previously on” and “let’s skip 3 years and gloss over all the shit that happened in it before we do anything else.”

Let’s not gloss too much over it. There is a LOT that happens in those three years… but to be totally honest, Cline made it really boring. At least to me. It feels like… an instruction booklet on how to receive the rest of the information in the novel itself, and that… just sort of rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of time got spent detailing new technology specs, file extensions (I’m not kidding) and just going over what was capable with the new fully immersive technology that lets people feel every sense of what’s happening to their avatar. Taste, smell, texture, all there in great detail. We get a little moment of real explanation as Wade experiences this for the first time but then it all goes back to a sort of expositional dissertation on what happens in the greater world with the technology. The first fourth of the book, the reader is more of an observer to things happening, and once I realized how mired in that observation I’d been thrust, it really rubbed me poorly. In short, the book starts unbelievably slowly. I was lucky that I’d picked up the audiobook for a road trip, and that first long drive section was pretty much perfectly timed so that once I was done, I was actually at a moment that the real conflict of the book had started to sprout. 

Don’t get me wrong, all of the information was necessary to some extent. It just didn’t feel like I was actually reading a book so much as having a whole other book explained to me. And a history book. I won’t claim the hubris to say I know how to have done this all better. I don’t even think I could, and I know that makes me seem like a critical shithead. I guess that’s the whole thing about opinions. Anyway… 

Then we get to the real conflict. Problems go from 0-100 really quick, and that felt pretty great. Honestly, the situation was worse than I expected. It took a little time to really get across just how dire the situation was, and once that was clear, I couldn’t help but get that sinking feeling in my throat when I saw just how little of the book was actually left. I had a lot of concern that there wasn’t going to be enough room to go through everything from a meta standpoint. How were we going to get through everything we needed to when we’d already gone through a solid 2/5 of the book’s length?

I needn’t have worried. Cline managed to cram in some pretty awesome quests and puzzles… but I hated of them. It took me a while to figure out why, and it turned out it was a combination of a few things:

Foremost and least important was that for some of the bigger miniquests, I wasn’t interested in the fandom involved. That’s fine, and that’s why I say this is the least important problem with the book. Not everyone is a fan of everything, and the subjects of individual levels of the quest just weren’t things in my wheelhouse. To spoil them, the main things I’m talking about are the John Hughes filmography and the career of Prince. I’m familiar with a couple Hughes films and I’m aware of who Prince was, but that was it. We had EXTENSIVE segments of plot that went so ridiculously in-depth of fandom references to those two topics that I couldn’t help but zone out for a lot. I was outside the major in-joke of these segments, so there was a whole lot of eyes-glossing-over for me throughout a huge section of the book. It was a little less so when we got to a huge section that involved the First Age of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. I’m at least a Third Age Tolkien fan, so some things were touched on that I understood, but I just couldn’t be bothered to be interested. The deep dives into the content bore no interest to me, so all I cared about was, once again, the destination, not the journey.

A bigger problem for me was that, while I got the import of these deep dives, I never really felt like there was any real struggle. Pretty much each level of the quest was like… a speedrun. Someone knew the answers, had the right items (or knew how to get them) and led Wade through. I’m not exaggerating. The spark of discovery was largely negated by always having what we needed in some form— a way to skirt problems like fast travel, or knowing monsters’ weaknesses. We got past every obstacle without really needing to worry about them. I never quite felt threatened, even when players started to die. Even the final battle wasn’t truly fought by Wade.

But then… we got to the ending, and I honestly feel like this is what Cline NAILED. I was totally entranced by the aftermath of it all. The aftereffects of the quest and what it implied were fitting, and if nothing else, I really feel like Wade finally truly learned something over the course of the book. The future set in the final pages feels right, and I won’t lie, THIS was the ending the characters really needed. The world of Ready Player One feels complete and finished after this ending. Once the book was over, I truly felt satisfied.

Which is saying a lot considering how annoyed I was at pretty much the entire journey. I honestly only truly enjoyed maybe 10-15% of the book, like truly enjoyed it. That said, I’m still very pleased to have read it. If nothing else, for the conclusion. I know I personally have a lot to learn about endings as a writer, and this one was a great example.

My writing habits are… not at their best right now. I guess… I’d kinda like to tell you a story about my writing habits and how things have been over the years.
​
THE BEGINNING (~1995-2008) 

I started writing in middle school. I was very much the precocious child, one of the “smart” kids or nerds. I was in elementary, middle, and most of high school through the 90s, very much in the hayday of putting all the “weird” kids in the Gifted program. I was in Gifted starting in 2nd grade. Of course, now I realize it’s where public schools put a lot of the neurodivergent kids. My classmates then, I recognize now as various functional autists, with plenty of ADHD sprinkled in. Turned out I was autistic, but anyway. I mention this just to illustrate that school itself was… not really much of a challenge for me. I was never skipped grades, though I was one of the youngest in my class (I turned 18 2.5 months after graduating high school). However, I was also one of the well-behaved kids. I didn’t and still don’t like confrontation. My autism very much manifests with strenuous rules of conduct and behavior. So I got very good at entertaining myself in class when bored.

In middle school that entertainment became writing. It persisted through most of high school and college. If I was in class and had already managed to do my homework or in-class assignments, I was writing. It wasn’t until I was in my gap year between high school and college that I finally got a dedicated desktop computer of my own, and I started typing rather than hand-writing everything. Yeah, I’m that old. 
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That computer got me through college, and if I wasn’t in class/rehearsal or at a recital (oh the joys of music majors) then I was… probably reading or writing. Between classes, it was reading, since I didn’t have a laptop, but in my dorm room, it was usually writing. 

So, a writer buddy of mine whom I’ve worked with before reached out to me yesterday, mostly to chat. However, it being the two of us, naturally we started talking writing. Long story short, we were discussing our current projects (mine being my LitRPG novel and his being book 15 in his urban fantasy series) and the idea came up between us to do a collaborative work again.

It’s been ages since I’ve worked with him, so naturally I started getting the brain juices going. He suggested science fiction as a genre, since we both dabble in it but haven’t done a lot to focus on it. I suggested a format: correspondence between two characters over relativity-necessary timelapses. The thought mostly stemmed from my irregular schedule, trying to think of something that would be manageable to eke out time for. But I also have tried collaborations before, and one of the places where I most notice issues for me is writing style. Unless one person is focusing on the writing, things can get distorted due to multiple writing styles between authors. Even if one goes back and rewrites everything to be cohesive… it’s still something I wanted to avoid. So two different people corresponding… that would make more sense.

Our brainstorm developed from there and… I think we’re going to at least give it a shot. We have basic framework, basic plot, and even a friggin’ working title already. 

So… I guess we’ll see!

"Stalker" is one I wrote back in college and... from what I can gather from my files and stuff, it was written during a short period around 2004-2005 when there was a tiny community of people doing a writing contest called "First Line Fiction." Each month-- or it might have been weekly, but I don't think it was-- the competition runner put up a single sentence. It was meant to be the first line of the story. I believe the word limit was 500, so these were flash fiction stories.

Once the submission period was up, each contestant was given a few other entries to rank. I'm wanting to say it was 3-5 entries. So it was a ranked voting/point system. The winner got like $50 or $100. I won once with the first story I did there, "Triple Homicide on Train FA-7."

"Stalker" wasn't a submission for the FLF contest. But I do know it was inspired by one of the first lines. How do I know? Because I have another story, "Pickup at The Join" that has the same first line, and it's less than 500 words. That was my entry for that contest.

"Stalker" is what I did when I didn't have the word count limit. Still flash fiction, but not short enough for the contest.

Anyway, enjoy!
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“She’s a local. The number’s in our area code.”

“What makes you think she’s a ‘she’?”

“Who else would text you this late on a Tuesday to tell you you’re cute? Unless you came out while we were at the club this weekend and didn’t tell me.”

Cal opened his phone and pulled up the text again. You’re a hottie. “Beats me,” he said, snapping the phone shut again. “How drunk did I get?”

Monty shrugged. “You think I remember how drunk you got? I was the one who passed out, remember? After throwing up in your lap on the bus home.”

Cal did remember. Nasty. He hadn’t even tried to clean those pants-- just threw them away. “So I probably gave my number to someone. Maybe a few someones… and now one of them is actually texting me.”

“I thought girls usually called.”

“This is the texting age.”

“Maybe she's a hottie. You tend to have pretty good taste, even when you’re drunk.” Monty grinned. “Text her back. Ask if she has a sister.”

“I don’t even know who she is!”

“Why should that stop you?”

He shook his head, stuffing his phone into his pocket. “I’m not going to do anything. If she-- whoever she is-- isn’t just messing with me, she’ll text again. Maybe then I might reply.”

Cal’s phone vibrated, rattling against the glass of water on his nightstand. The clinking woke him up. 

New Text Message

He flipped it open and opted not too look at it right away. Instead he checked the time. 2:57 stared at him. Cursing, he opened the text, looking first at the number. It was the same one.

​On my mind on my mind!

Grumbling, he closed the phone and went back to sleep.

Monty stared at the screen on Cal’s phone, looking at the texts Cal had saved in the memory, all from that same local number. “They were all sent late, like after midnight.”

“Except for that first one. That one was at quarter till. Big difference, I know.”

“She’s texted you almost every night for three weeks. And you’ve done what?”

Cal shrugged. “Been jerked out of sleep for every damned one of them.”

Monty thrust the phone at him, pushing it into his chest. “I’m telling you, this girl’s got a thing for you. Text her back!”

“No way, man! This is kinda creeping me out at this point. I mean, look at some of those last ones. Check the one from Monday.”

Sighing, Monty opened the phone and pulled up the text. “Baby you there? I like tomatoes and bagels,” he read aloud, trying hard not to laugh and making a strangled snorting sound instead.

"She does sound hot.”

“This isn't funny, Monty. I’m starting to get weirded out by this. I mean, I haven’t answered a one of her texts, but she keeps texting me almost every night.”

In Monty’s hands, Cal’s phone began to vibrate. “I’ll check it,” he said, flipping it open. Cal peered over his shoulder.

My pockets are greasy.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Some new weird stalker pickup line?”

The phone vibrated again. Sorry baby I forgot something.

Again. There’s a taco in there.
Ow! Stop it!
I’m stealing your pillow.

The phone was receiving texts faster than they could read them.

C’mon let’s go upstairs.
I’ll tell u when i’m finished.
u don’t like me
nononono

“I think she just lost it,” Monty said. “I’m calling her.”

“Monty, don’t!”

Cal heard the phone ring three times before a voice picked up. “Hello?” She didn't sound to alert.

“Yeah, hi. Um… I keep getting texts from this number. Really weird ones. Mind explaining?”

There was a pause, and Cal heard a yawn on the other end of the line. “Who is this?”

“Cal.“ Monty made a face at Cal as he said his name.

“I don’t know a Cal.”

“I think we might have met at The Cave, on Third Avenue, maybe three weeks ago? I can't think of anywhere else I might have given out my number.”

“Oh! Oh my god, I’m sorry! I think… have I been texting you?”

Monty rolled his eyes. “That’s kind of what I said.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I… I’ve been known to sleep-text. I’ll delete your number.”

Before Monty could respond, she hung up the line. Monty slammed the phone into Cal’s hands. “Guess you’ll have to find a new secret admirer, bro.”

On May 16, I had the good fortune to be able to attend (and work) the Parade of Horribles release/launch event at its Nashville, TN.

As much as I want to describe in detail like every freaking moment of the event and what I was doing (no kidding, working an event is a great way to interact with other fans) that’s not what I want to be doing here. I worked my butt off, sweated, got in way too many steps, and was up far too late with way too much adrenaline.

I have no regrets.

What I did see behind the scenes was the reality behind a dream.

I would absolutely love to see something I created be such a draw to so many people. There were something in the ballpark of 1000 attendees at the event, plus the author Matt Dinniman, his moderator Maude Garrett, and of course the venue staff and event workers like myself.

I’m no stranger to performing. I’ve been involved with some form of performance since I was a child. I’ve gone through countless theater productions, musical performances, podcast creation and editing, guest appearances, interviews, livestreaming, conventions, and I’ve done game mastering for tabletop RPGs for decades. These events are draining physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially. And there can be additional trials: you may be away from home, traveling, surrounded by strangers. You may not be able to go home every night to recover.

Fatigue is real, and I saw that in the people around me at the event. I was exhausted being feet on the ground at a single event. I wasn’t doing any coordinating, organizing, ore administrating. I wasn’t the center of attention doing talks and autographs. I was a one-time performer for a few hours, and it was performing the sense that it was sales and fan interactions.

What I did was like… 5% of what Dinniman was doing. Sure, he’s the center of attention and gets the “star treatment” as far as it goes for something like this. He gets the adoration, the attention, the questions and compliments, the interview, and the money. 

But I saw a man who was just shy of halfway into an absolutely draining two week tour. The Nashville event was stop four of like 9 stops, and the tour dates were May 11 - May 25. Literally two weeks or cross-country travel, hotels, and tons of people. At Nashville alone, multiple hundreds of people were in line for individual personalized copies of the book (or other autographed items). So on top of travel and being away from his home and personal comforts, he had setup and arrival, preshow interactions with fans and crew, then the interview, then a few hours of autographs and photos with a line that never seemed to end. 

That’s a long time to be “on.”

The man was exhausted and still had over a week to go. I mean, as of my writing this (May 25) he still has the final event to go tonight. Even after Nashville, he had to get up early to catch a flight to Florida to do it all over again the next night. Then the next day, a flight to Philadelphia to do it AGAIN that next night.

It’s so easy to attend something like this, a concert or release or other big event, and think it’s the dream. I want to be a big famous author and do stuff like this.

Reality is intense and exhausting. Rewarding, absolutely. I know when I’m a stage performer or panelist at a con or GMing a game session, I love it while it’s happening, but I get burned out after. Multi-day conventions have an energy all their own, but wind-down and recovery time are a very serious requirement. 

I can’t imagine what kind of crash Matt Dinniman is going to need when he gets back home. 
​
I guess what I’m really saying with this is just… be kind to your favorite content creators and performers. They’re tired.

​Once again, this is not a first impression of this book. I’ve listened to it MANY times and it’s part of one of my favorite series.

Here we go, the last of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books that I’ve already listened to. The next one will be A Parade of Horribles, and I cannot wait!

But for now, This Inevitable Ruin. I’ve only listened to this one twice, maybe three times since it came out on audiobook in early 2025. The whole premise is complicated. Carl, Donut, and the crawlers have finally reached the ninth floor: Faction Wars. This is the dreaded floor where not only do the crawlers need to survive, but they’re in the middle of a war. Outside entities— players— are in the dungeon in the tens of thousands to play wargames. The only thing is, thanks to things Carl, Donut, the AI, and the game’s own NPCs have been doing, Faction Wars is no longer safe for the visitors. Just like the crawlers, they will now permanently die if killed within the game. 

It took me a while to really make a cohesive description of what I wanted to discuss about Dinniman’s writing here. Partly because I’m less familiar with this book than the others, and therefore was paying more attention as entertainment than with a wordsmith’s ear. Partly because this is book seven, and I’ve already discussed so many things about Dinniman.

This book really nails a whole humongous multi-book, multi-seed, multi-plotline payoff. He even did so while maintaining control over the narrative, seeding and advancing other plot threads, and twisting a lot of resolutions in ways no one could have foreseen.

The nature of this is going to make me have to speak in a lot of vagaries in order to avoid spoilers. So this probably won’t be terribly in-depth to help preserve my own sanity.

First off, this being seventh in the series means it has had a lot of time to build up expectation. Dinniman always knew this was a major destination within the grander narrative because we started hearing about it pretty early, in book 1. In fact, with the very first piece of equipment Donut got, we had a giant sign in the sky saying the ninth floor would require an in-game destruction of a family line.

So yeah, we’ve had this on the horizon for ages, with some notable events on that subject along the way.

Of course, the floor itself being just a giant war was a huge plot device, so we can’t forget that. This is where Carl and Donut’s efforts to break the game come to major fruition. They’ve been working at clearing this obstacle for a long time, both in ways the reader has seen and ways they haven’t seen.

We have the branches of minor plots that have led here one way or another. For some, this floor was always a “deadline” for action on the plot. For some, we literally only learned about it last minute. I’m talking “epilogue of the previous book” last minute. 

Then he draws in a lot of thin plot threads that are just sort of dangling every which way, gathers them up, and throws them into the ball of yarn. Or whatever this horrible metaphor is I’m not really maintaining well. But he absolutely does. We get a whole lot of resolution on some of the massive list of minor characters in this series. Dinniman doles out a schmear of closure on a lot of characters, which is sorely needed. 

This book turned out to be a great bottleneck, a place where the plot would condense and thin, go from a huge cable to a tight wire. Or like, we’ve peeled away the outer layer of setup that has been used, revealing the delicious banana of plot focus within.

He’s given himself more and less to work with from book eight on. I can’t help but think it’s by design. He may not have known how much he’d have to resolve when he got to this point, but he anticipated how much freedom he had with the initial scope of the dungeon to set up all kinds of plot devices. He made a pretty good open world for himself in the first couple books, all kinds of things and mechanics and character possibilities to play with. He had the freedom to pretty much set up any sort of character or background to suit his needs at any time, knowing that if he didn’t kill them before this, there would be an exit if he needed to get rid of them. If he set up a plot line and only found himself dragging it along behind him as an afterthought because he couldn’t find a place to resolve it, he had plenty of logical ways to tragically end it because WAR. 

And yet, he did so much of this in a satisfying way. He didn’t take the easy out on so much. He set himself up for success, and he delivered well beyond belief. There is definitely some value in planning for a ton of loss, of thinning the plot within itself. I’m frankly amazed at the planning process for this, even if Dinniman is mostly a pantser, as I believe I’ve heard. The foresight boggles me, but it’s totally worth applying to your own planning when doing a series.

What frightens me, though, is knowing that the events in this book are just stepping stones to the next big thing. Stakes are getting big, things are getting worse, and it’s getting hard not to get scared.

May was hectic but productive. I mean seriously.

Short Story (working title “Recalled”) - Officially on the back burner. I’ll probably put what I have on the Patreon at some point for you guys to take a look at.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. It’s been rough. Still mulling over the title.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - That serious rewrite of chapter one is well underway! Well, let me back up. Last month I had 1445 words written on draft 1 on chapter 1. I got that up to 2159 and completed it, then started the second draft. Second draft is up to 1236 words, and compared to the first draft, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through!

June’s schedule settled down some, so it won’t be quite as insane and I should be able to dedicate more time to writing, especially since I’ll be on GM break from my usual D&D gig. I’m really finally starting to sink into Subscription Life, getting that itch. 

I believe I’ve touched on this subject a few times, but I wanted to make sure I actually went into it a little bit.

A lot of advice given to writers is to read. Read, read, read. Always be reading, along with writing. 

That’s good advice. But what the heck am I supposed to be reading? Fiction like what I’m writing? Stuff unlike it? Academic papers on psychology? Blog posts on writing?

The short answer is… well, yes. In everything you read, there is going to be at least a little something you can take from it that will make you a better writer.

Granted, everything isn’t going to have the same value for you, but there is always SOME value.
Read fiction that is like yours. I mean seriously. How are you going to write science fiction if you’ve never read anything science fiction before? What kinds of things will your space marines get up to that makes no sense if you haven’t gotten any sort of military experience, or at least gotten some idea what space marines do? How is your magic system going to stand up to scrutiny when you’ve never experienced one from another author? Or a dozen?

Oh no, but then I’ll be derivative of everything I’ve read! Yeah, that’s not how this works. You can always learn what you don’t like about other systems and writers, too. Just because you know how magic works in this world or that, or how space marines work in this universe, it doesn’t mean you have to copy them. There are no rules, but there can be precedents. You can strip layers and pieces off works that have come first, twist other things, completely replace some, and you have your own system. But I bet you may have also come across ideas and uses for resources (like magic or technology) that you never would have considered before. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Read stuff unlike your fiction, too! Seriously. Read histories if you write urban fantasy. Read romance if you write science fiction. Read horror if you write romance. There are tons of writing techniques, plot devices, all kinds of things you can learn from crossing genres. On the small, simple level, your fantasy might have some scary moments. Having read horror can help you on a meta level, knowing how to increase tension to instill dread and fear. Having read romance, your space marine commander can woo his love interest or seduce the enemy commander or alien overlord or whatever.

Academic papers? Yeah, read them! If they interest you, why not? But from a writing standpoint, they’ll definitely teach you specific vocabulary, how to emotionlessly get things across, and there’s always the use of subject matter. I recently did a post on writing what you know. This ties into it. Have interest in cell reproduction? I’m sure you can find ways to incorporate that into fiction somehow. It could be inspiration for an alien race, or a disease that affects magic users, or the basis for a monster. Your specific interests can help inform what you write.

There’s even value in reading very, VERY bad writing. I’ve slogged through more than a few stories and books that were horrible. Poorly edited, not at all fleshed out, just… bad. Sometimes there are lessons to learn in how not to write things. I’ve learned what kinds of things to look for as red flags in my writing mechanics themselves. I’ve seen great ideas executed so poorly it’s a real shame… and I’ve taken away lessons from them. Like how too much self-insertion turns into mental masturbation no one else will get anything from. How trying to hide self-insertion fantasy by making the subject of the book “You” rather than I or an actual main character is just as awful. I’ve read a romance where the majority of adjectives for anatomy are the same couple words… and I’ve learned how NOT to narrow my vocabulary that way. I’ve also read narratives where the author clearly used a thesaurus on far too many of their words in an attempt to sound smart. That backfires a lot. It becomes too much about the individual words then, rather than the whole sentence or paragraph.

Am I perfect? Far from it. I’m still learning. Always am. You should be, too. 
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Read. Read widely. You may not get a whole lot for your horror novel by reading that study on window and door glass energy efficiency, but you might.