Writer’s Craft #53 – The Inside Job

Lillian Cohen-Moore is a multiracial Jewish writer and journalist based out of Seattle, Washington. Her speculative fiction has been published by 365 tomorrows, Timid Pirate Publishing, The Edge of Propinquity, White Cat Magazine and The Irish Times. She currently writes for Another Passion, a Seattle publication for creative professionals. When she isn’t compulsively interviewing people,……

Spec Tech: Language and Culture

What is the relation between language and culture? How does the language we speak influence the way we think? These important questions are unfortunately too often not asked. People often assume a position without looking at the actual empirical evidence. On one side there are a good number of anthropologists who aver that language and……

Spec Tech: Your Protagonist Wants Sleeves: Fashion in F&SF

Most clothes are uncomfortable, cumbersome, and dangerous, and can really make your characters’ lives miserable.  As a writer, this is an underused resource for inflicting pain and suffering upon your poor, hapless protagonists. Unless manufactured on machines by cotton produced on industrial farms and sewn en masse by underpaid illegal laborers, clothing is expensive. For……

Spec Tech: Excuse me, do you speak Elvish?

As someone who studied linguistics, one of my biggest pet peeves in high fantasy is when our stalwart protagonist first encounters the elves in the forest, and he can of course speak with them because he’s half-elvish.  All elves speak elvish. It’s a racial thing.  Now, I’m not saying that it couldn’t be a racial……