There Was One Sex for Two Thousand Years

A Writer's Guide to Sex, Gender, and Bodies Before the Modern Binary

Feb 10 • D. S. Black

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Contrivance vs. Character: When Plot Mechanics Show Their Seams

Learning to follow characters instead of pushing them.

Feb 3 • D. S. Black

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January 2026

Why Flat Characters Come From Flat People

The interiority problem in contemporary fiction—and the writers who can't solve it

Jan 27 • D. S. Black

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Oscars for Monsters: The Double Standard Between Actors and Authors

"Why would you want to write something like that?" —asked with the tone of someone backing slowly toward the exit

Jan 20 • D. S. Black

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The Homosexual Was Invented in 1869

From Plato's Symposium to the AIDS crisis: why your period drama keeps getting sexuality wrong, and how to fix it.

Jan 13 • D. S. Black

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How to Be Wrong in Public

Most creators either crumble at criticism or build fortresses against it. Neither produces work that lasts. Here's the skill nobody teaches you.

Jan 6 • D. S. Black

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December 2025

The Canvas and the Cost: What Expedition 33 Understands About Worldbuilding

Expedition 33 won Game of the Year. The discourse has been predictably shallow. Here's what the game is actually about—and why every worldbuilder should…

Dec 23, 2025 • D. S. Black

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The Author's Psychological Labor

On performed empathy, the ego problem, and the craft of writing antagonists worth remembering

Dec 16, 2025 • D. S. Black

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The Cathedral of Silence

Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal has no dialogue. Here's what prose writers and narrative designers can steal from its wordless mastery of show don't tell.

Dec 9, 2025 • D. S. Black

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The Officer and the Beast: Dual Nature as Character Architecture

The transformation isn't the point. The containment is.

Dec 2, 2025 • D. S. Black

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November 2025

Stop Making Your Protagonists Sympathetic

Why the most interesting characters are the ones (other people say) you shouldn't like. Learn why diegetic writing and morally complex protagonists…

Nov 25, 2025 • D. S. Black

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The Civilised Beast: Why Peak Competence Looks Like Violence

On predation, focus, and why your most skilled characters should look feral. Peak competence is predation. I'm naming aesthetic territory that hasn't…

Nov 18, 2025 • D. S. Black

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