Hello again.

I know some people really love the blog format, and I do admire a well-maintained blog. Me, though? I’ve quit dozens of them. In the summer of 2013, I decided that I was going to write a very short story every day and post them all on my Tumblr. I did muster the discipline to […]

Christmas in the Catskills

Editor’s note: The following document from our paper’s unpublished archives was sent to the offices of the Cornell Goshawk in January of 1934. It was kept in the stained, unpostmarked envelope in which it was delivered until our editorial team found it while cleaning the mailroom several years later. A note enclosed with the manuscript […]

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 […]