“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is beloved by nerds everywhere, many of whom, like myself, are atheists, and indeed Adams defined him...

Arthur Dent in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” starts off as a very effective hero. We get everything we need in the first few pages...

Writer’s Digest published my book, so they might be biased, but it’s nice to get a bit of a shout-out for the work we do here. (Yes, the ...

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is one of the funniest books ever written and any writer can learn a lot from it, whether you aim to ...

Nothing makes one feel older that rereading a science-fiction book from one’s youth only to find that it’s come true in the meantime. I ...

See, I told you we’d get around to it! This is a very funny book. One reason that it got pushed pack was that I’d never finished the se...

Generally speaking, you want to make things hard for your characters. Everything feels better if it’s earned. Readers want to watch your...

You can marvel over just about any paragraph from “Beloved”, but let’s look at this one: The fat white circles of dough lined the pan...

It’s hard to conceive of the horrors of slavery. The word that keeps coming to mind is “inhuman”. Inhuman cruelty leading to inhuman suff...

“Beloved” is a great ghost story, a great family story, and, just as important, a vital story about the legacy of slavery. Crucially, Mor...

We’ve done a lot of popular fiction, so I wanted to do something “literary”, but something that most people have read. I chose “Beloved”,...

Hey guys, I was going to do  Hitchhiker’s Guide  next, but I didn’t want to do two nerdy-white-guy books in a row, so instead I figured we...

Hi guys, I’m almost ready with new material, but in the meantime, check me out on the Story Makers podcast , which has no overlap with my ...

Okay guys, we’ve done five books, which means that it’s time to add them to the sidebar alongside our movies and TV pilots. Check ‘em out...

An early piece I wrote about how they made a small change for the movie that robbed it of a lot of its power, but they had little choice, ...

Here’s the recent series I did about the first book: The Annotation Project: A Game of Thrones Before We Begin: A Full Accounting of M...

I could go on for another week about “A Game of Thrones”, but I’m wearing out, so let’s flip all the cards back* and get to the big questio...

We’ve talked about the pros and cons of having a prologue. “A Game of Thrones” has a particular kind familiar from genre fiction: the “ki...

Last week I focused on the ways that George R. R. Martin intentionally (and boldly) broke the rules with “A Game of Thrones”, and mostly g...

When we start “A Game of Thrones”, we’re quickly overwhelmed with names. Why does Ned have to take twenty riders with him out to chop off...