Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab - Let's make history! In this episode we talk about doing exactly that—creating real-feeling histories for secondary world settings. We discuss the resources we turn to, the pitfalls we try to avoid,

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - Alternate histories (and historical fantasies) are a staple of genre fiction. In this episode we talk about the worldbuilding process, the tools we use,

Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon - Let's talk about career planning. It's a lot more than just launching a career by selling a book, and in this episode we talk about the kinds of things we want to be thinking about and preparing f...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard - Where do you draw the line between what seems plausible, and what would be cool? If you pick "plausible," how do you stay cool? If you pick "cool," how do you avoid knocking the readers out of the...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab - Economists tend to see everything as economics, which is kind of how proponents of ANY discipline see their discipline, but it's not a bad way to look at worldbuilding through the lens of economics.

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - Among science fiction and fantasy plot devices, the "uncommon resource" trope is common enough to almost seem cliché. Fortunately (?), the economic principle of scarcity is ubiquitous enough ...

Your Hosts: Piper, Dan, and Tempest, with special guest Nicola Griffith - In this episode we discuss how to faithfully represent people with physical disabilities through the characters we create. Our guest, Nicola Griffith,

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard - The entire year has been about learning how to worldbuild, and we've learned a thing or two ourselves while preparing material for you. In this episode we talk about some of those lessons,

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab - In this episode we discuss how our customs and mores govern our own real-world interactions, and how our understanding of these interactions can be applied to our worldbuilding. -

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - We've all heard the adage "write what you know," and in this episode we set out to un-misinterpret it. The phrase is fraught, and perhaps the most perilous bit is that it can be used an excus...