Tag: Tropes
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The Freudian Trio
Before I get into the meat of this topic, I have some exciting news to share! Both RARE: A Dark Anthology of Unusual Secrets (featuring my sci-fi/noir short story “The Stuff Legends are Made Of”) and Gas Giant Gambit were submitted to the American Writing Awards by Alex Parker Publishing;…
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Gas Giant Gambit: Ray
When I’m figuring out my main characters, I like to fall back on one trope in particular: the Freudian Trio. Once you’re aware of this trope, you start to see it everywhere, but perhaps the best example of it is Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy. McCoy is the…
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Gas Giant Gambit: Themes
Over the last six or seven weeks, I’ve been spending a huge amount of my time back in Las Ráfagas, the central setting of Gas Giant Gambit. I completed one round of developmental edits, and practically before the second round was finished, we’d already begun on copy and line edits!…
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My Favorite Thing to Write: Genre Mashups with a Historical Bent
Wow. Yeah. That’s a mouthful. But as I look over the original projects I’ve got coming out over the next few months, as well as the projects I’m currently working on, this is undeniably true. I really love writing genre mashups that have a certain (if varying) historical element. Here’s…
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Writing Outside Your Genre 2: Electric Romance
Almost a year ago I wrote a blog about writing outside your genre. At the time, I was waiting to hear where I had placed in the first rounds of NYC Midnight’s 2024 Short Story Challenge and Screenwriting Challenge (I made it to the second round in both contests, but…
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Gas Giant Gambit: A Space-Western Heavy on the Western
This week, I had my very first guest appearance on a podcast! I spoke with Glen Weatherhead of the Creative Writing Wizard website and podcast (if you missed it, you can check it out on YouTube and Spotify [it may also be elsewhere, I’m not sure all the places Glen…
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What You’ll Find in My Writing
With Gas Giant Gambit coming out in September 2025, my sci-fi/noir short “The Stuff Legends are Made of” coming in February in Alex Parker Publishing’s RARE anthology, and “SSID” being the only example of my writing you can read in the wild (meaning not hosted on this website), now seems…
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Cosmic Horror
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. H.P. Lovecraft As a lifelong fan of science, specifically space, science fiction has always been an obvious choice for me as a reader. Couple that with the fact that…
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Writing Outside Your Genre
For the last two years, I have participated in a couple of NYC Midnight’s writing challenges, specifically the Short Story and Screenwriting Challenges. Last year, I made it to the second round of both contests. Right now, I’m waiting on results from the first round of each contest to see if I…
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Gas Giant Gambit: Gus
When I set to writing my upcoming space-western, Gas Giant Gambit: A Tale From Beyond the Cygnus Rift, I knew I wanted to subvert as many tropes as I possibly could. I love westerns, but the vast majority of them stick to the common tropes without much deviation and I…
E.S. Raye 