If you're having problems navigating campus or registering classes, please go see administration, not me.
After writing classes are done for the day, I work on my own writing projects and post smaller lectures.
When time permits, I'll even take writing prompts from students. If there's something you'd like to ask me, or prompt me to write about (I'll do short stories, essays, poems, whatever inspires me), feel free to write it down and put it into my incoming basket.
Latest blog post (5/21/2026):
Well, the first draft is done.
In case you don't know what I'm talking about, I've been working on a text-based - adventure? - experience called Paranormal Accounts, where a chunk of small stories with similar themes come together to tell larger, overarching stories (to anybody willing to do some sleuthing. Each story is also meant to be enjoyable on its own).
If you want to read it, you can click here or tune in on the radio in your dorm room.
I finally finished writing the first draft for Paranormal Accounts. It's... not very good. But I finished, and I'm proud of myself for seeing it through!
Seriously, though, the first draft is really bad. You can still read it and leave feedback, but... I understand now why people don't usually share in-progress versions of their work. A lot of the stories are, at best, poorly paced, and at worst, didn't even get finished properly. I expect the second draft to look completely different. Until then, I just wanted to talk about how I made it, what helped, what didn't work, and what I want to really get right in the future.
What went well
Playing with expectations
Going in, one of the vague concepts that fascinated me was this idea of playing with expectations. I really wanted to make strange details seem easy to accept, and benign details to seem as if they stood out; to create a kind of surreal, dreamlike feeling. People say that a good way to tell if you're dreaming or not is if written text changes when you're not looking at it. In dreams, letters lose their meaning and your brain will lose track of what you're reading - but, if you aren't actively looking out for inconsistencies like that, it's easy to accept it and not even realize you're dreaming. I think I channeled that pretty well, and I really like the surreal feelings that come with reading the disconnected pieces.
In a more real-world sense, I found examining tropes and playing off of ideas people already understand and expect was a great way to generate more ideas for any given story.
Good language
One of the most important ways to differentiate two characters is their respective character voices: How well-spoken they are, how often they use filler words, even how fast or slow they speak (yes, people read at different speeds, but using different language can impact how quickly the average person will read a sentence). I'm pretty happy with what's there, and hopefully I can reuse some of the better work I've done.
My thought process generally when trying to figure out a character's voice is to think about what they care about, because they'll most likely use more particular language or repeat themselves when they're talking about something they value. Then, where they're from and their upbringing, and also how social they are in general. Other factors that can have a big impact are a character's age, their emotional state, their job, how they feel about the person they're talking to...
There's a lot of places you can come from about this kind of thing. I'll admit right now - I haven't thought about every one of these factors for every character, but the more I consider about what would impact a character's voice, the happier I tend to be with how they talk. Something to keep in mind, I guess.
Leaning into comedy
This might go without saying, I'm not sure; leaning into the comedic aspects of an idea and trying to make it funny is, for me, a surefire way to get my creative juices flowing. Obviously, not everything should be comedic, but the tools you would use to make something funny can almost always be helpful if you apply them in the right way. What is horror if not telling jokes that make you scared? Horror and comedy both operate by building up tension higher and higher until it releases in an emotional, often unexpected way. It's just a very natural way to shape stories. That's what we like. Knowing this, no matter what genre you're aiming for, it's always helpful to be thinking about what your reader's feeling and what would make them react most strongly.
Taking breaks
Honestly, I hate to admit how much of a difference this made. It didn't feel like it would, but it really did. My pattern right now is to work for 25 minutes, take a break for 5 minutes, then repeat. Enough said.
What went poorly
Overrelying on plans
To get myself through the planning process, I counted out how many individual pages I was going to make and came up with an idea for each one separately. This was great for coming up with a lot of different ideas, but it had another effect: I lost the plot. Literally. By not focusing on the main storylines I was trying to tell, they wound up completely missing from the first draft. I didn't expect to be annoyed about that. In my head, there's a perfect version of PA where a bunch of drastically different segments all coalesce in surprising ways to tell interesting running storylines. Now that I have the draft to read, I can pick out a lot of problems, which means my priorities were misaligned from what I really wanted to make. Cutting stuff out is always so hard, but I can already see that a lot of what I made needs to go entirely. Not just tweaked or fixed- G O N E.
Mood boards and other inspirations
Yeah, I really thought looking at works with similar vibes and browsing pictures of old radios, etc. would really help get me in the mood for writing, but overall, it really didn't help all that much. I know a lot of people swear by their mood boards, so I'm willing to try again, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the whole thing was a waste of time. What is it really accomplishing? Art is transformative and it can be helpful to draw inspiration from other people's art, but I couldn't find very much that was inspiring. Was I looking in the wrong places? Is it something about me, or what I'm trying to make? Or is searching for inspiration not as helpful as it seems like it should be? If I wind up having more thoughts about this, I might make an essay just on this topic. If you have any strong thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them.
Leaning into comedy
Yes, this point is in both the good and bad sections. Here's the thing: one good joke is often all it takes to dismantle any other kind of emotion you might be trying to play with. People view things differently if they think it's comedy. It takes a very good author to walk the line between genuinely funny and genuinely heartfelt. Audience aside, I've noticed myself falling too often into the trap of looking for jokes, or trying to release tension early. It's a bad habit, and something I need to keep in check over and over. Comedic tools can be used in any genre of writing, but only if you have the understanding of how to use them. Otherwise, you're just writing a comedy (not that that's a bad thing, it's just that not everything sould be comedic).
So, there it is! My terrible, no-good thing I made! It might be a bad idea, but I think I'm gonna spend some time really not thinking about the story at all before starting on the second draft. I was starting to reach a point of, honestly, frustration with the stupid thing. I still believe in it (if I didn't, it'd been scrapped by now), which is why I don't want to try to force it into a finished state.
Thanks for reading. If you have anything to tell me, questions to ask or prompts to give, feel free to send me something. Now get out of my office, it's already nighttime.