IT IS TIME FOR BEST YAK.

YAKS BEST AT STORIES.

EXCEPT FOR THESE AUTHORS WHO ARE NOT YAKS BUT ARE WRITING ABOUT YAKS. SO IS CLOSE ENOUGH.

And we begin with crime. 

Because as Jack of a Few Trades points out, Hot Cocoa is Illegal in Yakyakistan.

Read More

Time to move on to the birbs! Continuing the Young Six series, I'm turning this week towards Silverstream. 

First up: There She Goes! by Miller Minus. 

Read More

So hopping along, the next of the Young Six I'm gonna pull out is Smolder. (This time it's only semi-random: remember me mentioning semillon last week? Yeah, I'm having to actually sort this series to make sure not to feature them twice in a row.) So who am I gonna pull out first for Scoota-dragon?

Read More

Right. A month or so ago I mentioned that I was getting ready to launch some bigger thematic batches of stories, which is why I was trying to clear up my new authors folder. The bigger one of those was a focus series on the Student Six, which I'd planned to start as soon as a month came up with five Wednesdays.

…Yeah I was supposed to start it last week. Bother. 

Read More

Earlier today, I was shooting the shit with Aklinstar about some of the statistics blogs I've done in the past and I noticed there was one I never did an update/follow-up on. I promptly dropped everything to do exactly that, which is because I'm deeply interested in stats and data and not at all because I'm frustrated with the way my current writing project is going because I can't find a character's voice and this is a good way to

Read More

Okay, so changing gears again-again. This time mostly because I have no time. This is one of those weeks where everything happens at once, and I've been positively hopping with how little free time I've got. 

But that's no excuse not to talk about how absolutely cool stories are, and honestly I've made it this long without missing an update so I'm hardly going to start now. 

Read More

And now back to our regularly scheduled program and my attempt to clean out my rookies shelf. (I've only got a few, I'm determined to at least catch up to this month with them.)

Which brings me to the oldest story I've got on that stack: The Anchor by jphenix.

Read More

Okay, so there's still new people to get through but you gotta remember that this blog series is mostly reliant on my whims. And I'm a little bored on that front, so I'm gonna switch gears and do a different pair of stories. Because I can. Also because I was reminded of one of these stories this last week and they're pretty damn funny.

Read More

Probably the hardest genre to get right is mystery. Not only do you need to craft a solid narrative that fulfills all the requirements of a good drama or comedy (because without that it's just a trumped-up logic puzzle), but you also have to create that mystery itself. It can't be too obvious - otherwise why bother - but you also can't make it rely on bullshit and information the reader is never told. 

Read More

So continuing down the road to clear out my new authors folder, I'm going to put the focus first on one of the newer folks I really like: pneu. They've got a couple of really good ones, but the one I'm settling on today is my favorite of theirs so far: Haycartes' Method.

Read More