What do I like about fantasy fiction? Maybe the struggle with received wisdom

I made a top-10 list of speculative fiction recently and I noticed something funny: Most of it is science fiction. It's funny to me because I rarely write science fiction. I write fantasy to avoid having to justify why the world fits together the way it does. I

Disagreements in Too Like the Lightning function as prompts for the reader

(Minor spoilers for Too Like the Lightning. They're so minor I'm not even doing a soft break here.) I'm listening to Too Like the Lightning on Audible (which audiobook I strongly recommend) and there's something interesting about how it uses disagreements. They

TTRPG system rulebooks scale poorly for learning

There are tons of interesting tabletop RPG (TTRPG) systems out there that aren't Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) that would be cool to try, and I am unlikely to run or pitch any of them because it's such a hassle to when you can just

"Agile worldbuilding" is great for scoping

World Anvil has a video about agile worldbuilding which I found useful for addressing the scoping problem I was thinking about yesterday. It's essentially a structured, ordered list of questions with a length limit on answers to get things started. The questions start from the broad strokes in,

Scoping worldbuilding

Science fiction and fantasy stories demand worldbuilding, but a world is an enormous thing where it's only a slight exaggeration to say everything affects everything else—so where the hell do I start? Well, I could start anywhere. Wherever convenient, wherever's fun. If I have an