Category: dialogue

Okay, not so much rant.

Well, no more than usual, I guess.

I try to have a running list of seven or eight topics for future blog posts. That way if nobody asks a question or something doesn’t leap out at me, I’ve got something to fall back on. One of the ways things end up on the list is that I’ll be dropping links into a post, pointing back at when I previously talked about this or that, and I’ll suddenly realize I haven’t talked about whatever it is for six or seven years.

At which point I’ll usually let out this tired sigh and think something like holy crap I’ve been doing the ranty writing blog for a long time.

Which brings us to me ranting.

No, wait. That brings us to dialogue.

Hopefully we all understand how important dialogue is, yes? It’s how we bring characters to life, making them sound and speak like real people (sort of—more on that in a moment). It’s also the absolute best way to communicate information to my readers (or any audience) about the characters, their world, or the situation they find themselves in.

Likewise, dialogue is one of the easiest, quickest ways to alienate a reader. If my characters sound forced or stilted or just… well, unnatural, it’s going to push my readers away. So it’s something I’ve got to get right.

I know! There’s so many friggin’ things I need to get right for this to all work. But this is why so many people give up and you’ve stuck with it.

Anyway, I’ve talked once or thrice recently about different aspects of dialogue—vocabulary, subtext, arguments—but it’s been a while since I did a big “here’s a dozen or so tips” rants. So what I’d like to do is toss out a bunch of general “hey, think about this” things I’ve picked up from years of screenplay reading and manuscript reading. Just little things I should to keep an eye on in my dialogue. If it’s something I’ve ranted about in a bigger way at some point, I’ll link back to it.

And, as always, not every one of these is going to apply to every situation in every book. Nobody knows your book better than you. No one. That’s why it’s up to each of us to figure out exactly how this character sounds and speaks to move my plot along, to develop their story, to keep my narrative going, and so on.

Here we go.

Grammar – As you’ve probably noticed in your own life, very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English. Our tenses don’t always match. Verbs don’t always line up with our nouns. A lot of “spoken” English can look awful on the page. And this makes some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile those words with the voice in their head. When I lean into grammar I lose that natural aspect of language in favor of the strict rules of grammar, and I end up with a lot of characters speaking in a precise, regulated manner that just doesn’t flow.

This doesn’t mean toss grammar out the window and write however you want. People still need to understand what my characters are saying and that I’ve chosen to have them speak this way. But dialogue does give us a little more freedom in how we say stuff. See?

Contractions– This is kind of a loosely-connected, kissing-cousins issue with the grammar thing I just mentioned. Some folks avoid contractions because they’re trying to write correctly! But most of us use contractions in our everyday speech—even scientists, politicians, professors, soldiers, everyone. It’s just human nature to make things quick and simple. Without contractions, dialogue sounds stilted and wooden. If there’s a reason for one of my characters to speak that way, then by all means do it. If my characters are regular, native English-speaking mortals, though…

As a bonus, using contractions also drops my word count and page count. Win-win.

Transcription– Okay, some of you know I used to be a journalist and did lots and lots of interviews. One thing it taught me is, with very few exceptions, people trip over themselves a lot when they talk. We have false starts. We repeat phrases. We trail off. We make odd noises while we try to remember words. It’s really common and normal

BUT… anyone who’s ever read a strict word-for-word transcription of a conversation (or typed up a lot of them) will tell you it’s awkward, hard to follow, and a lot gets lost without the exact inflection of certain words. This kind of ultra-realistic dialogue will drive readers (and editors) nuts. Plus it wastes my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines. This sort of rambling can work well in actual spoken dialogue, but it’s almost always horrible on the page.

Similarity– People are individuals, and we’ve all got our own unique way of speaking. People from Maine don’t talk like people from California, people living in poverty don’t talk like billionaires, and fantasy elven princesses don’t speak like futuristic bio-engineered soldiers. My characters should be individuals, with their own tics and habits that make them distinct from the people around them. If a reader can never tell who’s speaking without seeing the dialogue headers… I might need to get back to work.

On The Nose—If you’ve ever heard someone call dialogue “on the nose,” they mean the characters are saying exactly what they’re thinking without any subtlety or subtext whatsoever. It’s the difference between “Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to come up and have sex in my living room right now?” There’s no inference or implications, no innuendos or layered meanings. And the truth is, we’re always layering meaning into what we say.

Pro tip—I’d guess nine times out of ten, if a character’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose dialogue. It just works out that way. I’d guess half the time it’s just exposition (more on that in a minute).

Humor—Here’s another human nature thing. A lot of us tend to make jokes at the worst possible times. Breakups. Office reviews. Funerals. It’s just the way we’re wired. The more serious the situation, the more imperative that release valve is for us. In fact, be honest… people who never crack jokes make us a little suspicious or uneasy. Not everyone and not at every moment, but when there’s no joking at all, ever, it just feels wrong.

Plus, how a character jokes says something about them. Do they make non-stop raunchy jokes? Do they have a dry sense of humor? A completely awful sense of humor. Do they have any sense of when it is and isn’t appropriate to tell a certain joke?

Flirting—Flirting’s like humor in that it’s almost universal. People show affection for one another. They flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers. Sometimes—like with humor—at extremely poor times. It’s not always serious, it can take different forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in a lot of casual dialogue exchanges.

Flirting is also like joking because it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue. Flirting requires subtlety and implied meanings. If nobody in my story ever flirts with anyone on any level, I might want to take a second look at things.

Profanity—Yet another ugly fact of human nature. We make emphatic, near-automatic statements sometimes. We react verbally. We throw out insults. How we swear and respond to things says something about us. Phoebe doesn’t swear like Wakko, and Phoebe doesn’t swear in front of Wakko the same way she swears in front of her mother. Or maybe she does. Either way, again, that’s telling us something about her and making her more of an individual.

Fun fact—some profanity is regional. The way we swear and insult people here is not how they do it there. So this can let me give a little more depth to characters and make them a bit more unique. I mean, I had a character who often shouted “tarnation” or “pissbucket!”

Accents– Speaking of regional dialogue… Writing characters with accents. There are a handful of pros out there who can do truly amazing accented dialogue, yeah, but keep that in mind—a handful. The vast majority of the time, writing out accents and odd “language” tics will drive readers and editors nuts.

I usually show accents by picking out just one or two key words or sentence structures and making these the only words I show it with. Just a bare minimum. Like most character traits, my readers will fill in the rest.

Dialogue Tags—I just talked about this a few months ago, so we won’t spend long on this. I don’t always need to put Yakko said, Dot replied, Wakko said, because after a point it should be apparent who’s talking. Plus with less words, dialogue gets leaner and faster. Tension builds in the exchanges because the reader isn’t getting slowed down by ongoing reminders of who’s talking.

Names—Related to those dialogue tags, if I don’t need names around the dialogue, I need them even less in the dialogue. Pay attention the next time you’re on the phone with someone. How often do they use your name? How often do you use theirs? Heck, if my friends call my cell phone I know who it is before I even answer—and they know I know—so I usually just say “Hey, what’s up?” We don’t use our names, and we definitely don’t use them again and again in the same conversation. If I’ve got two established characters, it’s really rare that they’ll need to keep using each other’s names. Especially if they’re the only ones there.

Monologues – Here’s another observation. Most of us don’t talk for long. We don’t give lectures or monologues. We tend to talk in bursts—two or three sentences at best. When I have big blocks of dialogue, I usually think about breaking them up. Is this person just talking to themselves (see above)? Is nobody there to interrupt them with a counterpoint or question or a random snarky comment? Is this monologue even necessary? Does it flow? Could I get all this across another way? Is this a time or situation where Yakko should be giving a four-paragraph speech? Especially if it’s the fifth or sixth four-paragraph speech…?

Cool lines— Our latest ugly truth (so much truth in this rant)—everything becomes mundane when there’s too much of it. If everybody can sink a basket with a hook shot from the three point line… sinking a basket isn’t that impressive, is it? If everyone can fly, being able to fly doesn’t seem like such a big thing, does it? As a wise supervillain once said, when everyone’s super… no one is.

The same holds for dialogue. We all want to have a memorable line or three that stands out and sticks in the reader’s mind forever, but that’s the catch. They’re memorable because they stand out. They’re rare. If I try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, none of them are going to stand out. When everything’s turned up to eleven… well, it’s all at eleven. It’s monotone.

Exposition—Remember being a kid in school and that one teacher who just read right out of the textbook? Just raw, boring facts poured out in front of you, often without a lot of context? That’s what exposition is like to my readers.

Simple test. If a character ever gives an explanation of something the other characters in the room should already know (or my reader should know)… cut it. Seriously, just slice it out and see if it really makes that much difference. If nothing gets tripped up and things move faster…

“As you know…” – Closely related to exposition. I’ve mentioned this once or thrice before. I need to find every sentence or paragraph in my writing that starts with “As you know” or one of its cousins. “As you may recall…” “You all know…” Once I’ve found these, I need to delete them.

Think about it. A character saying “As you know” is openly acknowledging the people they’re talking to already know what’s about to be said. I’m wasting time, I’m wasting space on the page, and I’m wasting my reader’s patience. If I’ve got a rock-solid, lean-and-mean manuscript, I might be able to get away with doing this once. Just once. Past that, I need to get out my editorial knife and start cutting.

Listen to It—You may have seen the suggestion to read your manuscript out loud to help you see how things flow. Personally, I think this works great for catching errors, but not as good for catching dialogue issues. Since I wrote these lines, so I know how they’re supposed to sound and what they’re supposed to convey. When I read them aloud, there’s a chance I’ll be reading things that aren’t on the page, if that makes sense.

So if you’re worried about dialogue… get somebody else to read it out loud. A real person, not a text-to-voice program. Just a few pages. Let a friend or family member who doesn’t know it read it out loud and see what they do with it.

And there you have it. A big pile of tips which should help your fictional dialogue seem a little more real. Fictional-real, anyway. Not real-real.

Next time…

Holy crap! WonderCon is this week! Like, tomorrow! If you’re going to be there, I’m doing a Friday night panel called Neighborhood Nightmares, a Sunday afternoon session of The Writers Coffeehouse, and a later-Sunday autograph session. Plus I’ll probably be wandering the floor before/after those. If you’re going to be there, please stop by, say hello, ask a question or two!

Anyway… next time here, because it came up on Bluesky… I’d like to talk about twists.

Until then, go write.

I had half a thought about networking I was going to expand on, but as I started to write it out I remembered I just ranted about networking, well… not that long ago, relatively speaking. And I don’t want you all thinking I’ve only got three or four pieces of writing advice. So I’m skipping ahead to talk about zombies. Sort of.

Honestly, I’ve ripped this one apart and put it back together three times now.

I’ve talked once or thrice here on the ranty writing blog about using obscure words and overly-elaborate language. Usually in the negative sense, because this kind of stuff often throws up barriers between me and my readers. Best-case scenario is they have no idea what I’m trying to say. Worst-case is they get frustrated, maybe because they realize I’m just doing this to try to look clever, and they stop reading.

Well, they stop reading my work, anyway.

This doesn’t mean I should never use obscure or specialist words. It just means I need to be better about how and where I deploy them. Over the years I’ve come up with two simple rules-of-thumb for using obscure words or jargon in my books.

First, have there be an actual reason to use an obscure word. And no, showing off my vocabulary isn’t an actual reason. These words should fit the character, the situation, the world I’m trying to build. It should make sense and sound natural (within these guidelines).

Second, define it in the story. There’s a bunch of reasons something might need to be explained in a story. Plot reasons. Character reasons. If there’s a real reason to use this word or term my reader probably isn’t going to know, there’s a good chance someone in my story doesn’t know it either. Which means I have a believable reason to explain it. Keep in mind, that explanation can come in a number of ways, but it should get explained in a believable way.

ProTip on that last bit. I don’t want to fall back on “as you know” to explain things. Or a thinly-veiled version of it.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I do it, and I’ve seen other folks do it, too. Again, just a rule of thumb, but if I’ve used glabrous to describe a character… maybe I should see if these two rules apply.

Want some examples?

Okay, well, this is where the zombies come in.

Shaun of the Dead begins in Shaun’s favorite pub where his (very-soon-to-be-ex) girlfriend Liz is explaining why things aren’t working out between them. One of her big reasons is that they don’t ever get to do anything alone because Shaun rarely goes anywhere without his best friend Ed (who Liz insists she likes), which leads to her often inviting her flatmates along (who Shaun insists he likes) which only exacerbates things. Which then leads Shaun to ask… what does exacerbate mean?

Look at that. First, we’ve got the added subtext that Liz is a bit out of Shaun’s league, casually using a word she thinks s pretty straightforward and he admits he doesn’t know. Then we have the explanation, because Liz is trying hard to be gentle here, and, you know, let’s stay on track with the breakup talk, okay?

Or how about this one– remember when Doctor Who introduced the word petrichor to millions of sci-fi fans? Short version, Amy and Rory were trapped in a TARDIS gone mad and had to unlock a door with a telepathic lock. And one of the “keys” was the word Petrichor.

So here we are again. First, it makes sense this would be a slightly obscure word (and a scientific one) because it’s essentially a password in the Doctor’s time machine. And it makes sense that Amy and Rory have to be told exactly what the word means because they’re dealing with a telepathic lock—it’s not just looking at the word on a screen, it’s looking at the word in their minds, at their understanding of it.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s nothing wrong with rarely-used, obscure words in my manuscript. I just want to use them in ways that strengthen my story, not one that pushes my readers away. Because pushing readers away is… well, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of this, doesn’t it?

Oh, and one last thing. I hate to be that guy, but… well, it is award nomination season for things that came out in 2025. Nebulas, Locus, Hugos. If you were they type of person who nominated things and wanted to put up God’s Junk Drawer, the Combat Monsters anthology, or even just my specific story from it “The Night Crew”… well, I’d be grateful.

Next time… okay, look, next time you’re just going to have to trust me and go with this next one, okay?

Until then, go write.

This is one of those things I’ve meant to revisit for a little while now. So, hey, let’s talk about the Children of Tama.

“Darmok” was one of the most popular episodes of Star Trek:The Next Generation, but on the off chance you don’t know it (it’s been *cough* thirty years, after all)–the Enterprise crew is attempting to open relations with an alien race called the Children of Tama. All previous attempts have come to a grinding halt because the universal translator can’t make sense of their language. It can be rendered in Federation English, yeah, but the words and sentence structure are just… gibberish. Determined to solve the problem, Dathon–the Tama commander—kidnaps Captain Picard, dropping the two of them on a hostile planet where they have to learn how to communicate and work together in order to survive. Through the course of this, Picard comes to realize Dathon’s language isn’t based on individual ideas and concepts, but on stories and metaphors. The Children of Tama wouldn’t say “I’m so relieved and happy to see you,” they’d say something along the lines of “Carol, when Zosia returns to Albuquerque.” It’s been impossible to properly translate the Tama language because the Federation doesn’t share their history and folklore.

In a way, all of us do this every day. We reference movies, TV shows, books, pop culture events, and then we stack and combine them. And we know people will understand us because they get the reference. It’s why we understand memes and reaction gifs and emojis.

Heck, want to know what an ingrained aspect of our language this is? When Bluesky first opened up, it didn’t have the functionality for gifs yet. So for almost a year, people responded to posts by just writing out things like “DiCaprioToast.gif” or “CasablancaShocked.gif.” And then the next step was (no joke) screenshots of Dathon from the “Darmok” episode describing various gifs. No seriously, that was a thing for a while.

Now, we also do this on a smaller scale. All of us have jokes and references that are only understood by certain circles. Coworkers. People who share a common interest. I may not get that programming joke, you might not understand School Spirits references, and neither of us are going to get those hardcore biathalon jokes. Pretty much every job has its own “inner language” and shorthand.

And sometimes those circles get even more intimate. Friends. Family. Even individuals. My gaming group has a bunch of things we all say that nobody else would comprehend. I’m in an ongoing group chat with a bunch of writers and we’ve got a few inside references none of you would get. And heck… my beloved and I have little things we say and do that nobody besides us would really understand (it’s how we’ll identify each other when the pod people/ body swappers take over). But to an outsider they could sound rude or confusing or like, well… gibberish.

Now, I’m willing to bet you all understand what I’m talking about here. The real question is, why am I bringing it up on the ranty writing blog?

A not-uncommon problem I see from some folks is they write dialogue loaded with references and figures of speech from their own personal experience. It might make sense within the writer’s personal circles, but outside readers just end up scratching their heads. And when this gets pointed out, the writers responsible for this issue will try to justify their words in a number of ways…

One is that their friends talk this way, and their friends are real people. Therefore, people really talk this way, and there’s nothing wrong with it. The thing is, as I’ve brought up here once or thrice before, “real” doesn’t always translate to “good.”

Two is they’ll argue this joke or reference is common knowledge. They’ll say the material is generally known– universally known, even– so the problem isn’t them, it’s the uneducated, unaware reader. This one’s tough, because it can be hard to agree on what “everybody knows” or even what’s generally known. If somebody honestly believes that everybody knows who won Best Original Screenplay in 1938, there’s not much you or I can do to convince them otherwise short of assembling a large focus group.

Y’see, Timmy, I can’t just write for my five closest friends. I mean, I can, sure, but not if I want to have some degree of success. I’m not saying my writing has to appeal to everyone and be understood by everyone, but it can’t be loaded with so many in-jokes and obscure references that nobody knows what I’m talking about.

This is one of those inherent writer skills that we all need to be good at. We need to keep learning and being aware of the world. Not just the world as we want to see it, not just the parts that interest us—all of it. Because if a large swath of my story assumes you know the entire Japanese voice cast of Parasyte, Vietnam-era military jargon, or why talking about squirrel voices counts as sexy talk… it probably means I’ve just knocked my readers out of the story.

And knocking people out of my story is never a good thing.

In conclusion, the Children of Tama eventually joined the Federation. Lt. Kayshon was chief of security on the USS Cerritos and everyone could understand him. Most of the time. Commander Ransom, the first officer, even learned some Tama phrases.

Also, nobody won Best Original Screenplay in 1938. The category wasn’t invented until 1940.

You didn’t know that…?

Next time, I’d like to talk about what was really going on when we met.

Until then… go write.

There’s a little maxim you may have heard– work smarter, not harder. If you haven’t, what it means is some folks solution to every problem is to throw 100% of their effort at it. They’d throw 110% at if that was possible. But it’s not.

Meanwhile, another type of person will look at the problem and figure out how much effort it actually needs. Do we want to do the time and work to dig through the mountain when we could go over it? Or around it? And then we can save all that effort and energy for somewhere we actually need it rather than burning out early on problems we could’ve just, well, easily gone around.

I mention that so I can tell you a few stories. There’s a theme. Trust me.

A bunch of you know I worked in the film industry for about fifteen years. Mostly television, some movies. Some of it’s even stuff you’ve heard of.

An all-too common problem I saw from beginning directors (and let’s be honest– also from plain bad directors) was an urge to make every single shot special. Every one had to be Oscar or Emmy-worthy. Didn’t matter if it was a wide shot, a close-up, a master, or coverage. Didn’t matter where it fell in the story. Didn’t matter what the day’s schedule looked like. Every shot of every scene required hours of set up and rehearsals and discussions and little tweaks and adjustments.

Now, on one level, yeah, this is sort of the director’s job. To make it all look good. But there’s a lot of nuance there. I can make an individual shot look good, sure. But does it fit with the last good shot? Does it fit with the rest of the scene? Is the editor going to be able to cut these shots together in a way that works within the filmic, visual language we all know on some level? Heck, does it even fit in the story I’m telling?

Plus, well… this is going to be an awful shock for some of you, but there are a few capitalist aspects to filmmaking. Yeah, sorry you had to find out this way. Making a movie costs money. It has a budget, and one way that budget’s expressed is in how long you have to shoot something. Spielberg can take a week waiting for the absolute perfect sunset his heroes can ride off into, but I’ve got today and it took us too long to get to this location so I might get two tries at this if I’m lucky and that’s it.

Anyway, what this meant for the crews I worked with was we’d get stuck with a new (or bad) director and they’d spend hours on the first two or three shots of the day. Like I mentioned above, it didn’t matter what they were or were they fell in the story. These folks would spend the whole morning working on whatever scene happened to be first up, and then we’d come back from lunch and surprise we still have 83% of today’s schedule to shoot in the last six hours of the day. So we’d rush through all that stuff—again, no matter what it was—and then come in the next day and, well, usually watch them do the whole routine again.

And this was really bad, from a storytelling point of view. The final film or TV episode would end up uneven because there was all this visual emphasis on random scenes that didn’t need it and often very little on scenes that did. Heck, once or twice I saw folks spend all this time on a random “pretty” shot and it wouldn’t even get used because there was no way to cut it in. These directors were so focused on making individual shots look amazing—no matter what that particular shot was—that they didn’t stop to think of the film as a whole.

Okay, this actually reminds me of another fun story (still semi-related). A few years after I got out of the industry, my beloved took me to an Academy screening of Pacific Rim (yeah, she’s super cool) and Guillermo del Toro was there talking about the movie. One of the things he stressed was even though he knew large swaths of the movie were going to be mostly computer-generated, he didn’t want any sort of wild, impossible “camera moves.” You know, the ones where the camera’s essentially whizzing through the air and then it loops down under the monster’s armpit to come back up between punches from the giant robot and then it circles around the two of them before pulling back for the panoramic shot of the city in flames as they fight? We’ve all seen some of those, right?

Yeah, del Toro didn’t want any of that in Pacific Rim. He understood those sort of visuals becomes distracting very easily, and once the audience is thinking about them they realize how impossible these moves are. And suddenly a big chunk gets lopped off their willing suspension of disbelief. They become consciously aware they’re just watching a movie rather than getting drawn into the story. That’s why the CGI camera shots in Pacific Rim are all set up as if actual, physical cameras are there doing regular, normal shots.

Now… I told you all this so I could tell you about Krishna Rao.

I worked with Krishna on a show called The Chronicle, back when the SyFy Channel was called the Sci-Fi Channel. Krishna started out in the crew (one of his very first film credits is on John Carpenter’s Halloween) and over the years worked his way up the ladder (seriously check out his list of credits), becoming a director of photography and quite often a director as well. Which is how I knew him. He had a loose rule he tended to follow when he was filming an episode. Honestly, I’m not sure he ever even put it into words, because it didn’t really click in for me until the second or third time I worked with him.

Krishna would only really plan on one pretty shot a day. That’s it. Once a day we’d have a complicated move with the camera dolly or some other elaborate shot that required lots of set-up and rehearsal. Everything else would be simpler, workhorse stuff– masters, overs, some coverage if it was needed. And I’m sure a few folks reading that may have some thoughts about “real” directors or the lack of art in American television or whatever. But here’s a few things to keep in mind.

Krishna made his schedule pretty much every day. Because he didn’t overload himself trying to do too much, he could make sure all his material fit together just how he wanted. He still had at least seven solid, very pretty shots per episode—that’s a cool shot every six minutes in a standard 42 minute television episode. And because he was being careful about using them, they always landed where they’d have the most visual impact.

And, sure, like any rule, sometimes he’d bend it a bit. He wasn’t against doing something fun or clever if he could do it quick. Sometimes we’d do two pretty shots in a day, maybe because of stunts or special effects. But these were always the exception, not the rule.

And his episodes always looked fantastic,

Okay, all interesting, but what does it have to do with books? With, y’know, our kind of storytelling? We don’t deal with visuals.

Y’see Timmy, something I’ve talked about a few times here on the ranty writing blog is pointless complexity. In structure. In dialogue. In vocabulary choices. I’ve seen stories with the most confusing non-linear structure just because the writer… felt like using non-linear structure. There are folks who scoff at using pedestrian words like blue or house or said. They spend all their time figuring out how to bury their story (or hide the fact that they don’t actually have one) behind layers of complexity.

To be clear, I’m not saying any of this stuff is inherently bad in and of itself. Personally, I love a story with a clever structure, an author who knows how to use their full vocabulary, and some twisty-turny character motivations. But a key thing is that when they do this—when they make a choice that isn’t the basic, workhorse choice—is that it’s actually making things better. This added complexity is an improvement, not an affectation.

And one other thing to consider. Sometimes… we need the simple stuff. We need the workhorse to just come in and deal with this paragraph or page. Because if I try to make every single sentence/ paragraph/ chapter the one that gets me an award, what I’ve really done is make a flat, monotone manuscript. If every single line is the utterly amazing artistic-piece-of-beauty one, they all have the same weight. Nothing has emphasis. To paraphrase one of great modern philosophers, once everything is super… nothing is.

So think about where you’re putting your effort. And how much of it you’re putting there. And how much you might want somewhere else.

Next time, I may blather on about the Children of Tama. Haven’t talked about them in a while.

Until then, go write.