Counter Craft

Katsushika Hokusai from Fugaku sanjūrokkei (Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji) Hello readers, I’m pushing through to finish this Principles of Plotting series, so this Part IV post immediately follows “The Principles of Plotting Part III: Variation.” If you missed the other posts, I would read them in order as I explain the idea behind the series and also describe the principles in roughly descending order of importance. Here are the links to Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Illustration of a “plotting room” Hello readers, Every couple of weeks, I get a nice note or restack about my Principles of Plotting series. So, I figure it is finally time to get off my ass—or I suppose sit back down on my ass—and finish the series. To quickly recap, I find myself annoyed at both the vague literary world aphoristic advice1 and the absurdly prescriptive rules found in many genre and Hollywood screenwriting guides2.

Hello readers, You may have noticed I didn’t post a Counter Craft article last week, which is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel Haunted Hills. The process of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind my last two novels, Metallic Realms and The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just the way it seems to go with books.

This is going to be a more scattered post than usual as I’ve spent recent weeks in the novel mines finishing up my forthcoming haunted houses (yes plural) novel Haunted Hills. I plan to write more about that soon. For now, some other things: Despite being deep in the novel mines for the last few months, I did manage to emerge and finish two short stories that are coming out in two very different yet equally cool anthologies.

The author on writing through grief, the ghost of setting, and adding a layer of dream to reality Author photo by Jordan Ledy Processing is Counter Craft’s semi-regular interview series where I talk to authors about the craft and writing process behind their work. You can find previous entries here. This week, I’m excited to be talking to Hannah Lillith Assadi about her moving, resonant, and all-around excellent new novel Paradiso 17.

Quick thoughts on the Granta AI scandal and a bunch of other recent AI scandals The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) For all of the truckloads of money and advanced technology behind LLMs, their primary achievement so far may be in revealing how low the bar is in seemingly every field. The various LLM/AI scandals this week are good evidence of that. Let me do a little recap.

From The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Yes, I acknowledge this is a bit of an overly dramatic image choice.) For this week’s Counter Craft, I’m trying something a little different and co-publishing a conversation with John Warner about Substack, the state of literary venues, and trying to make a living as a writer in the modern media wasteland.

Albrecht Dürer circa 1512–1525 Two tangentially related topics this Friday: I was interviewed by Hao Nguyen for the How I Make Money Writing Substack. Authors probably don’t talk about money enough, even if many of the reasons are understandable.

“Ugh, we’re doing math in a literary newsletter?” I’m deep in the novel revision mines—Haunted Hills coming to you next year!—so this article will be on the shorter side. I wanted to relate a little publishing industry gossip and then explain why book sales can be so confusing. The word on the street, as the kids no longer say, is that Romance and Romantasy sales are starting to tank.

From The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard circa 1767–68 In January, I started a series on what I’m calling “the principles of plotting” and then got a little sidetracked. Sorry for the delay, but I’m back with Part Two today. I’d encourage you to read Part One first. But I’ll summarize Part One briefly. There is a tendency in some corners of the literary world to mock the idea of plot or even to call it “fascist.” And even when plot isn’t looked down upon, it is often simply overlooked.