Wild Magic

Hi Reader, In the interests of reaching more people more easily, I've built eight focused writing-instruction sprints. Each one is eight weeks. Each one comes with a Dare and an Exercise every week — real work you'll submit to me directly, and we'll talk through each of them as they come. They're not passive emails. They're not a subscription service. They're a sprint, and you can see them at arough.trade/chains. Here's what they are: The Life — Everything writing school left out: money,...

Hey Reader — the game I almost made For about two years, I was absolutely making a board game. Not designing it in the abstract — I was playtesting, building mechanics, producing physical prototypes, doing the whole thing. The premise: a chain of islands, each one a different kind of world, each with its own rules and its own kind of danger. A world caught mid-apocalypse, where the western coast of America has dissolved into a few island nation-states. Players chose from a set of characters...

Hey there! anaïs is beautiful Reader, Anaïs is beautiful. She is also, under that beauty, completely feral, and this is always a surprise to people because she comes in so warm and so fast that by the time they realize she is about to climb them like a trellis it is absolutely too late. brother, it'll be a cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here's in repose She loves women with a specific, physical, whole-body devotion that I find both embarrassing and aspirational. She does not...

Clifton Creative Hey — You're getting this because at some point you signed up for something connected to me. Maybe it was Television Without Pity. Maybe it was a newsletter I mentioned and then went quiet on. Maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was — I appreciate that you're still here, even if I haven't given you much reason to be lately. I've been incredibly busy in ways that are hard to summarize, but I'm going to try. I'm writing a new novel. It's called Oldie....