Writing Tips Blog of Many Colors

Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

Here we talk about the writing process, worldbuilding, tropes, character design, and being an author. Also queerness and asexuality specifically, with the occasional bit of shower thoughts, AI-bashing, and a few mini essays here and there on whatever I'm feeling like.

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Interested in some vampire fantasy? How 'bout some merfolk?

Eternal Night of the Northern Sky

Three hundred  years ago, the vampire covens of the North took the sun from the sky. In the frozen wasteland that remains, clans of the living cling to warmth in a way the vampires never predicted—hunting the undead down for the fire  in their veins. When Clan Maewag’s last blood slave takes their own life, Elias joins the hunting party in braving the surface. When the worst happens, Elias finds himself trusting a vampire to save him from the Freeze. Conflict brews between a coven thriving in a glittering utopia of equality and a coven enduring on blood slave servitude, with Elias trapped in the middle. What makes a monster in the sunless, frozen North, where survival demands Elias betray home, his people, and every truth he’s ever known?

Genres: New Adult, Queer Lit, Dark Fantasy

Available in ebook and paperback!

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Tell Me How Long

Finley McCann is an aspiring marine biologist, spending her days watching the ocean she loves die before her feet as the world spins on unmoved to stop it. Three years after a chance meeting with a survivor of a species thought extinct for centuries, Finley stumbles on an opportunity to save a Mer, and shock the world into acting before it’s too late. Tell Me How Long is a twist on the modern merfolk myth, and what it takes to survive under the threat of humanity in the open ocean.

Genres: Contemporary Sci-Fi, Mystery

Available in ebook!

Some notable posts of mine:

How to make your writing less stiff (1-9)

Dialogue Tags (Ohhhhh)

Character Dynamics the world needs more of

10 more of those

5 more of those

Yet another 5 of those

Aaaand 3 more

On Foreshadowing

On Pacing

On Fantasy Worldbuilding

The bag I happened to be carrying down in that moment had inside it an old cigar box that I’ve had for years. Idk where I got it but it’s a vintage Cuban cigar box, polished wood, with some pretty art on the inside I guess little me was fascinated with. And in that box, I keep my passport, spare cash, ssn card, and… my spare car key. It’s the box I would grab in case of fire.

The building had a spare key in an e-lock box in front of the door, so I tried to get in using the combo that I just gave to a friend last week to pick up a package for me so it wouldn’t get stolen. And when I couldn’t get it, I called him and he already knew the situation, and just decided to drive himself over to help me finish moving and I got out of there twice as fast.

Having the spare didn’t make a difference on whether I could get back in the building, but it meant I didn’t have to leave those bags on the sidewalk or haul them back upstairs and waste more time. *Not* having my full key ring meant I got help that I initially didn’t think to ask for, because I’m so used to doing everything alone.

And I’m here to say, as a creative myself, there’s little nobler that anyone with time and an internet connection can do than to keep creating. Yes there might be more impactful acts of resistance like protests and marches, but to stay here as the house is washing away in the floodwaters continuing to keep a little fire burning and a home cooked meal warm for weary, disillusioned wanderers?

Bringing this up now because I've been on a hyperfixation binge watch of Kyle Hill videos. Way back when, he was the host of the "Because Science" videos on youtube taking hypothetical scifi questions like how a functioning lightsaber would be catastrophically and unusably hot, or how various mutant powers would be so much deadlier because physics.

He's got his own channel now for several years, and much of that channel focuses on nuclear power in history and particularly nuclear accidents and incidents.

And in one of his videos about Three Mile Island, he spends much of it ripping Netflix a new one for its dramatization of the event as it conflicts with the much less severe and dangerous actual historical evidence which then perpetuates an overblown fear of nuclear power and yet fervent defense of fossil fuels that cause way more harm.

And I bring this up, because we tend to take documentaries as inherently objective and factual, vs something like a biopic with an agenda or your standard "based on a true story" movie like Oppenheimer or Sully or Zero Dark Thirty. But documentaries are made by people, too, and funded by people with agendas.

I *love* nature documentaries, and want to believe that, by being a nature documentary, the "agenda" at play here is "please care about conservation by growing emotionally attached to this baby penguin" and not something sinister.

But maybe some aren't. Some definitely aren't when it comes to historical documentaries, whether it's about war or political figures or celebrities or religion.