I used to be Mormon. My fellow inkpunk Galen used to be Mormon, too. We became friends because we were atheists who found ourselves stuck in the LDS Church, and we bitched about it on the same online forums. You may be asking yourselves, that’s all fine (or John, that’s not fine at all), but […]
Author Archive > johnremy
Abuse Your Muse
They will not force us…They will not control us…Rise up and take the power back! How many of you have read Northern Lights? (that’s The Golden Compass to you northamericaners.) Remember those animal daemons that followed the characters around? They were human souls made manifest. I sometimes picture our Muses in a similar fashion, except […]
Fail better.
I live in a state of constant failure. Even this post represents a failure, since I’m not writing on the topic I’ve been struggling with for the past week, and I’m repurposing an old personal blog post instead. I take on more that I can realistically handle, and I aim much higher than I can […]
On SpecFic Writers as Visionaries and Mystics
Among my people, girls born blind were sometimes apprenticed to mediums. When they first bled, they entered into a long initiation of hard labor, sleep deprivation and exposure to the cold to force their sight into Anoyo, the Other World. Then they traveled on foot from village to village, and the poor folk would gather […]
Write What You Don’t Know
On the surface, you’d think that writing what you *don’t* know should come naturally to authors of specfic. I mean, how much does anyone really know about what it feels like to face a Hound of Tindalos, or to download an assassin’s persona into your brain, or to have your body transformed by the effects […]
Using Music to Find Your Story’s Voice
As comfortable as I am with the other elements of a story, voice is mysterious and magical to me (but Christie says that a strong voice is one of three things found in great stories). It’s not something I can pull out of my writer’s toolbox–I feel like it’s something I have to discover when […]
Creationism vs. Evolution as Metaphors for Writing
Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. Â – Samuel Beckett There are all kinds of cultural narratives that address our place as tiny creatures in this vast and cold universe. One popular story says–and I’m reaching waaay back to my days as a Mormon missionary here–that we humans are the […]
One Tweet at a Time.
01. It’s easy to belittle twitter: “You can’t say anything meaningful in less than 140 characters!” “Who cares about your lunch?” 02. Sure, some phrases can lift or cut: “We’d like to buy your story.” “Luke, I am your Father.” Or, “I’m leaving you.” 03. But they have power only because they’re carried by other […]
Write as if Your Parents are Dead
[Note: this post is in response to a reader request by @sheikyurbouti. Thanks, though this may raise more questions than answers…] 1. “Write as if your parents are dead.†2. I’m sorry if your parents are dead. But I’m not sorry enough to stop. 3. You may have heard this advice in a creative writing […]
A Writer’s Dozen: Eleven Ways to Get Story Ideas
This summer, I went to an SF writing workshop where we had to force out one short story per week for six weeks. Someone told us that by the final week we would reach deep into our [ASTRONOMIES] for ideas only to discover that there was nothing there, not even [SHIATSU MASSAGES]. I found, however, […]
