Haunted Houses and American Exceptionalism

Recently, I settled in to watch the new Netflix special The Haunting of Hill House. Based on the Shirley Jackson novel of the same name, it’s a great show in many ways, and its content about family dynamics felt fresh and original. But this was an accomplishment, because the bones of its plot were identical […]

Those Meddling Kids

My friends and I like to play Into the Odd as a one-shot RPG sometimes between our longer tabletop campaigns. It’s a great game for quickly generating strange, gruesome characters and going on a strange, gruesome adventure with no discernible end goal other than to make an amount of money not measured in pence. Last year, though, […]

Shannon

A dungeon that my friend Tamora and I made for the One Page Dungeon Contest, where we made it into the winner’s circle and won a PDF of Blades in the Dark. Which feels like a pretty big accomplishment for our first time making a thing together. Contributions broke down somewhat like this: I did […]

Worldbuilding Resources

People often talk about writing as a solitary act, or a mysterious process of inspiration. And it can be. But a lot of the time when I’m writing, especially when I’m doing the heavy worldbuilding that goes into making a persuasive speculative fiction, I’m not working entirely alone. I’m drawing on pre-existing tools, materials, and […]