Tales from the Circle

The Prism Effect by J. Wint is set in a future post-apocalyptic Earth (or, rather, on some belt structures orbiting the now almost uninhabitable Earth) and it follows the main character Jet through the beginning of his university career. He's not a normal university student, though, he has a rare condition that makes his eyes glow and renders him an outcast - a condition about which not much is known, except that there is no cure. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially the first 2/3 of it when it focused on the mystery of the condition and Jet dealing with it and making connections with others on campus. The slow pursuit of more information about this condition and the way that's woven in with his university life (which is mostly sport-focused) is well done. I'm not the biggest sports fan or anything, but I found the way that was done realistic and I never felt it overwhelmed the story. It allowed us to see some aspects of Jet's day to day without having to go too d...

This blog post is inspired by a thought-provoking post by The Fantasy Inn ’s Hiu over on Reddit. The post was asking a lot of questions about character agency and how necessary it is for a good, well-written character that people will connect with to have agency. Basically, does the character have to have agency in order to be a “good” character.   What I liked about it most was that it inspired all kinds of questions about different types of characters, personalitites, external vs. Internal constaints on a character’s agency, and so on. Questions that are worth asking when it comes to any character. So I thought I’d do a little exploration of some of my own characters and look at them from an angle that I never necessarily thought about specifically and examine their level of agency and how it affects their stories. I’ve come up with nine general questions inspired by that original post and the replies/discussions.   Does the character have agency within their society...

I’ve been wondering lately about what, exactly, it is that makes a reader care. About the characters. About the world. About the stakes presented in the story. Because there are a lot of stories that will present huge stakes and have decent prose and do a lot of stuff right, but they still don’t manage to make me care at all. On the author end I may care a lot about a certain character, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to write about them in a way that makes the reader care. And of course every reader is different. Maybe this is just another way of procrastinating on my actual writing, but I kind of want to explore some of the things that make me, personally, care when I’m reading a book. Things that pull me in and make me invested. Like I said above, every reader is different, but I’ll start with my own personal preferences and then see if I can take a step back and generalize them somehow. I’ll begin my exploration by choosing a few of the books or series that I enjoye...