Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Dan, Tempest, DongWon, and TJ This is the first of our Writing The Other episodes, in which we set out to help writers portray people who are unlike them. In this episode we're joined by T.J. Berry. She walks us through the language and terminology of bisexuality. 

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard Margaret Dunlap joins us during season 14 to talk about worldbuilding. In this, her first episode with us, we talk about worlds in which a monolithic culture (like, say, 'everyone wears hats') is represented. We cover how to use the trope to your advantage, and how to avoid the trope if it's going to cause problems.

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab Mahtab Narsimhan joins us this year for a dozen episodes on worldbuilding, and this week we're talking about geography and biomes. These pieces of our settings can be central to the stories we tell, but they can also be backdrops, and the story purposes they serve may determine which tools we use to describe them. Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Season 14 is all about worldbuilding¹, and we're kicking it off with a discussion of when you do that bit of work. Do you handle worldbuilding before you write the story, as you write the story, or after you've finished the story? We'll talk about how we do it, and the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. Credits: This episode was recorded by Benjamin Hewett, and mastered by Alex Jackson. ¹ The question of whether this term should be a closed compound (worldbuilding), an open compound (world building), or hyphenated (world-building) is an open one. Our decision to use the closed compound "worldbuilding" in our episode descriptions this year is a matter of personal preference. 

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Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn. Last week's episode may have sounded like the last one for 2018, but that's an artifact of December having five Sundays rather than four. Fifth Sundays are our "wildcards," and something wild seems like a nice way to round out the year. Tom Marshburn, who is both spaceman and parent, talks to us about what it's like to be both. Credits: This episode was recorded by Ben Hewett, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard We decided to wrap up this year on character by letting Brandon ask us some deep questions. "We decided" might be the wrong phrase, because nobody except Brandon knew what the questions were, so it might be more accurate to say "we rolled with it." It rolled quite nicely. Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson. It was posted to the web by Howard, who is also the one who didn't post until twenty-eight hours and twenty-minutes after he should have.  

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Zoraida Córdova Zoraida Córdova, an award-winning author of urban fantasy, was born in Ecuador and grew up in Queens. She joins us to talk about what writers get wrong (and what they can get right and do well) when portraying latinas in the United States. Credits: This episode was recorded live at FanX Salt Lake (formerly "Salt Lake Comic-Con") by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson Liner Notes: The comic book Howard referenced is Guardians of Infinity #3, (2016), which features a back-up story entitled "Yo Soy Groot." Peggy Whitson is the astronaut Mary referenced. As of this writing, she holds the record for longest single spaceflight by an American.  

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Amal, and Maurice Last week we talked about character death. This week we talk about other, less fatal ways in which a character story can be finished, and how we, as writers, can tell when we're done with a character arc. Credits: This episode was recorded by Andrew Twiss, and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard The characters we create are not all destined for long lives. Sure, some are, but a great many of them are on paths that will end in an abrupt fatality of one kind or another, and in this episode we'll talk about how we choose which characters to put on those paths, and how those paths might be shaped. We also talk about characters who walk perilous paths and emerge unscathed (sometimes thanks less to their pluck and wit, and more due to plot armor.) Liner Notes:"The Worshipful Society of Glovers" can be found here at Uncanny Magazine . Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard You had questions about fixing character problems. We had had answers! Here are the questions: How do you fix character voices when you find out that two of them are too similar? How can you tell if a character is, in fact, the problem? How do you maintain interest in a character who is largely inactive? How do you write interesting bad guys when your only POV characters are the good guys? How do you give meaningful challenges to a powerful character? How can you make a normal, everyday character interesting? How do you edit an existing manuscript to give characters interests which mesh with the plot? Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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