A blog of fog and whisky (and airships)

For a story to succeed, the individual scenes need to work hard. What does that mean and how can you know whether your scenes are working hard enough?

The Black Mirror episode “Bête Noire” has a broken spine. What do I meant by this and how might it have been fixed? Let’s dig in!

Not having read Jules Verne, I’d hoped to be delighted by an early science fiction “master”. What I found was pretty appalling.

Do your characters have a destiny? Or do they make choices? This post discusses how both can be true.