Today, I’m going to try to be a little more positive than I was last week: I’ll be talking about five tropes that I personally enjoy in stories. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you probably already know what the first one is going to be…

ount. Today, I want to talk about some of the things that I’ve learned from writing so much (and I have written a lot). I’ll be listing five things that I wish I had known a decade ago, so this is something of a letter to the version of myself that hadn’t quite received his first writing award, yet. Hopefully, if you’re a writer who’s just starting out and looking for some help, this will be exactly what you need!

In this post, I’m going to talk about five tropes in storytelling that I absolutely loathe. Some of them I hate because they are fundamentally awful, others because they’re overdone, and still more simply because they run counter to my personal tastes and wants. This is all largely my subjective opinion, so some of these may be tropes that you enjoy!

In today’s spoiler-free post, let’s talk about the entirety of the first season of The Legend of Vox Machina as a complete whole: the good and the bad. If you’ve seen my prior reviews, you know how I felt about each episode in this first season, but how do I feel about the entire thing now that it’s over?

Today I want to talk about my own experience with getting a vasectomy, start to finish, in the hopes that it will encourage others to just get out there and get this thing done. I’ll be going over my personal reasons, how I convinced the doctor to do it, what the procedure was like, and how recovery went!

Dark content has been prevalent in stories of all kinds for a long time. However, it hasn’t always been as pervasive or in-your-face as it seems to be today. It seems like we can’t turn on a show, go see a movie, play a game, or open a book without experiencing content that’s aggressively dark or grim hitting our eyes at some point during the story. This is something I’ve seen ramping up lately, particularly with the success of shows like Game of Thrones. The question I want to ask today is… do stories need dark or controversial content? Are violence, gore, sex, drugs, trauma, and other topics that have been considered taboo in the past necessary for stories? Do they improve the stories overall, or would the stories be better if this content were cut?