Of Poetry, Sounding Good and Being Useful

I took a course called Technical Writing in grad school. The professor assigned a short manual that he had written himself as the required reading. He spent a lot of the time talking about the precision of language required to…

World Building: Where Are We? Part II

So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…