Adaptation can be a tricky business for anyone, particularly when you're talking about a beloved, well-known property. While this usually applies to Hollywood making sanitized, less-interesting and wonderful film adaptations of novels, adaptation itself extends far beyond such petty boundaries. In a way, some fanfiction is itself a form of adaptation - we are, after all, converting characters and a world that previously existed in the form of a film or video game into serial novel form. Some

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One of the hardest things to get horror fans to agree on is what counts as 'scary'. What frightens me out of my wits may leave someone else completely unbothered, and likewise what they count as terrifying I might refer to as "last Wednesday night at my place". It is very rare that a horror story is so good that it manages to capture all of the potential niche audiences at the same time. The same readers who made House of Leaves into a story so popular that I've actually made a guessing

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Most of the time on this blog, I try to write things I think might be smart. Occasionally i just really recommend stories and shows I like. But every so often, I just want to share something silly.

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Horror is a niche market, but that niche is dedicated, vocal and has quite a few gurus willing to explain what does and does not make for good horror. Unfortunately, most discussion I’ve found online has offered advice for cinematic horror -there’s plenty of advice about making a good horror film or horror game, but not as much discussion out there about how to write good horror. I am about to (Mary preserve me) attempt to offer this kind of advice.

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Summer is apparently the “season of spooky” in Japan, as constant recommendations to listen to “The Fox’s Wedding” on youtube remind me. I don’t think I need the extra excuse to go out and experience some chills, however, because I already have a deep love for horror.

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When I mentioned in my last blog post that I wanted to write about how a lack of understanding and intentionality killed an entire genre of pony-fic, the two guesses most people seemed to respond with were either "Displaced" or "Human in Equestria". While technically the first is a subgenre of the second, what I actually want to talk about is a subgenre of both. This is something that has bothered me more than anything else while perusing the gutter of trash and toxic waste that is

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Kurt Vonnegut famously proposed that a sufficiently talented writer or storyteller could break any of his twelve rules of writing except the most important: the rule that an author may never waste the time of their reader. For the most part, I believe this is true. Much like how fans of golden-age mystery novels can probably point to one or two of their favorites that break key rules in Knox's Decalogue or how people who worship Stephen King's On Writing can probably think of

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Warning: This blog contains frank criticism of erotic fiction from this site. While it contains no quotations, links, or sexual content and I have tried to keep the prose to a level of "work-safety" that would be acceptable for a casual reader, if you're personally squicked by the idea of MLP porn this may not be a post worth reading to the end of. That said, I encourage you to brave the waters, because oh Lord was this particular story worth castigating.

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I feel like I'm uniquely unqualified to really talk about the passing of David Bowie, as if he meant something to me. I mean I loved his music, but he was always one of those artists I sang along to whenever he came on, but didn't own a single album by. He wasn't the music of my adolescence (Sting) or the music of my childhood (can't even remember) or of when I first went to junior high (The Aquabats- no, really). But he was always there. Around me. I remember seeing Labyrinth and feeling

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This is basically my sequel to "You Are a Mary-Sue (And So is Cthulhu)", where I talked about how I feel like the term "Mary-Sue" is a bankrupt critical concept which doesn't accurately describe the problem with characters because the definition is too broad and too easily twisted. If you haven't already read that- though honestly given I've got like five of you who are dedicated readers of this blog, so you all probably have already- feel free to go back and check it out now.

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