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I thought it might be nice to try something new this week.  If you watch my Goodreads profile, you'll see that I tend to read a lot of different kinds of books.  Of late, I've become hooked on short story anthologies, as they give me such a broad range of stories and styles in one convenient package.  The best anthology I've read recently is John Joseph Adams'  Help Fund My Robot Army!!! The premise of the anthology is that each story is told as though it were a project page on a crowdfunding site such as Kickstarter or Indigogo.  The format is pretty well restrained, as the author is limited to essentially a sales pitch, different levels for backers, updates, and occasionally some conversation through backer comments. Even with these restrictions, the authors who wrote the stories that make up this anthology are able to use every little bit to create characters and worlds that feel completely fleshed out.  For example, Jake Kerr's story "A Memorial to ...

Something that every person has to deal with at some point is pain.  Be it physical or purely emotional, how a person handles pain says a lot about that person, and people can learn a lot about themselves when they have to encounter pain of some sort. I find that figuring out how a character reacts to pain is a great way to flesh out a character.  It's usually just a thought experiment, though occasionally I'll write a brief scene to help me solidify the things I learn about that character.  For example, I'll put the character in a situation that would cause the "average person" some sort of emotional pain - the death of a family member.  Finding out how the character reacts to that brings up a ton of questions right away: How close is the character to the family member in question? How does the character react externally, in public? How does the character react privately? Is there anyone that the character would feel comfortable expressing their pain to...

One of the nice things about having a lazy Saturday at home is that something random on TV will spark inspiration.  This weekend, it was the History Channel (which, every once in a while, remembers that their focus is history ), and  101 Objects that Changed the World .  The list is basically a bunch of tangible items that represent some major change in the world, or some major event in history.  It includes things like the hard hat (which allowed major buildings and bridges to be built safely), the cannon ball shot at Fort Sumter (beginning of the US Civil War - the list is a bit US-centric, shockingly enough), and the Coca-Cola contour bottle (first major company to use uniform packaging). It made me wonder what objects would be considered "essential" in a world that I'm currently building.  There's the big important thing, in this case a golden rope that magically binds the different territories of the land together, but that's not something that the averag...

Happy late Fourth of July to those of you who celebrate!  I sincerely hope you all still have as many fingers as you started with.  Naturally, the recent holiday made me think of how to create and celebrate the holidays in the worlds I'm building, and how they would look to outsiders. For example:  Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, my family and I lived in a Naval station in Spain.  We lived "off-base", in a gated community where several houses had been leased by the US military and the rest of the community was made up of local civilians.  On the Fourth of July, the only place where anything was really happening was on the base itself, as the day wasn't any kind of holiday to the rest of the country. My father was never a big fan of crowds, and we knew that the base would be filled to the brim with homesick Americans watching the fireworks and listening to "God Bless America" while hoisting their beers.  Instead of going on base to celebrate wit...