Recent content by Creed

Listening to this interview with Michael R Fletcher on the Grim Tidings podcast, it sounds a lot like the regular world of publishing in terms of how much effort it takes to make a name for oneself: be social, think about media, and use social media. In the interview, Fletcher describes how he...

I heard about Wattpad and started reading on it years ago, but only recently did I return. And I noticed that there were millions of readers in the fantasy section. Like... millions. I looked into it more and it's quite a robust platform now, with options for advertisements as well. I started...

The Trope Twister challenge is live! Get your blender ready and kick some trope butt!

:D Great idea! We should have a flash fiction thread in the Daily Challenge section for "Trope Twisters." I'm not sure how many tropes can be spun on their head in less than, say, 300 words, but it could be fun for the MS community. :)

Sure, but for me the very presence of child geniuses is irksome in fiction. I can get behind children being creative to solve problems, but that was not Kvothe's story. It was also annoying how the trope just dropped, and he forgot all of his skills in magic for hand-wavium plot reasons. I...

Favourite tropes: The Genius Loci, when a location has a mind or spirit. This can be so cool! Tarot symbology, or tarot character archetypes. They carry the aesthetic of tarot and the occult, and really add to an atmosphere in fantasy. Really great for foreshadowing, like The Tower. I love...

Choose-Your-Own stories have kind of faded away these last few decades, but they've definitely found new life online. If you're looking to play choose-your-owns, interactive fiction, or games like Zork I'd highly recommend checking out what people are crafting with Text Adventures and Twine...

It's hard to disagree with something that keeps cropping up on here as a given, but I feel the need to. There's a fixation on detail in the OP, and detail as the way to make things "interesting". And that boils down to the writing itself. Characters may be the foundation of a plot, but they're...

Yeah, it's too bad it's over. Then again, something like this could just as easily pop up on MS forums. Low-commitment flash fiction, 140 words or less? Hmmm... an exercise for a rainy day!

This is just the coolest thing I've seen on Twitter in, well, maybe ever... (Scroll down for the earliest Tweets) Here's the tweet from @Harkaway that started it all: Hundreds of people then began tweeting away micro-stories in the enigmatic, endless City of Urm. And the city actually...

I don't skip prologues. I really don't understand why people do. Should I buy/read this book? Read the first sentence, then paragraph, whatever. But if the writing's bad in the prologue, you've already got your answer and it's pointless skipping to Chapter 1. If there's a prologue, the...

Actually, it's interesting you bring that up! This definitely is something that follows a similar vein as cell phone novels. Check out the Twitter Fiction Festival archive. Some very interesting (often multi-media) narratives are played out on Twitter for it, including actors and YouTube clips...

skip.knox hits the nail on the head: the restrictions turn prose into something hybrid with poetry. In the video, for example, Takatsu says that he uses line breaks in a way that mimics poetry. His word count is unaffected, but suddenly he's drawing attention to certain words in a way that...

It's not so much the fact that you're writing it on a smartphone or tablet, it's the fact that the device is changing how you write it. Earlier models of cell phones forced the user to send sms messages in small packages, and that's what defines the limit. While I definitely respect the "short...

Many Scribes have probably never heard of these. In fact, I just learned what they were two days ago, but apparently they're huge in Japan and they have a large market, and the concept is so simple and so accessible I wonder why they're not bigger in North America (or at least Canada). What...