Megan R. Miller's Blog, page 2

Worldbuilding: A Cosmology of Servers

Salutations, my Curious Congregation! I'm in a gaming place at the moment and was bitten by a renegade idea the other night that I want to talk about a little bit and develop and I'm hoping it will give you ideas as well.

This one is mainly for my tabletoppers, but if you're writing science fiction and like fantasy or vice versa you might still find this interesting, so writers in the audience feel free to stick around. Tapletoppers, feel free to use this at your table; feel even more free to...

Power Imbalance in Relationships

Salutations, my curious congregation~ I left off last week talking about how power imbalance in relationships can make them interesting, and right now we're going to talk some about romantic conflict and imbalanced ships.

If you are sitting here thinking "I want to write this pairing but one of my characters is a bit of an asshole and I don't want the internet to come at my throat", this might be the blog entry for you. But, just FYI, part of the internet is going to come at your throat no mat...

Sex Scenes and How to Make Them Relevant

Salutations, my curious congregation. I'm in the process of reading a book and I'm not going to say which one because I don't want to go pointing fingers, but there is a lot of sex. A lot of sex that doesn't have anything to do with the story or with character development. It's not my shtick, but I understand a lot of other people like it. More power to them.

Personally, I'll give you as much sex as you want if it's plot relevant. And one gratuitous sex scene per novel. Two if it's really long...

Immortal Characters and How They Relate to Mortals

Salutations, curious congregation. I've been having a lot of feelings about immortal characters lately, and part of this blog entry was inspired by Jenna Moreci's 10 Worst Romance Tropes video, and if you're not already watching her you should check her out because she's hilarious and has a lot of good advice.

In the video one of her gripes was about characters being hundreds of years old and yet falling for 21 year olds. Now, if you've met me, you know Mayfly-December romance is one of the tr...

Writing to Your Audience

Salutations, my curious congregation! Let's have a talk about knowing your audience and writing to them.

-muffled sounds of some fedora yelling about pandering in the distance-

-reaches up and closes the window-

Today we're going to talk about why it's important to know the kinds of people that are going to be interested in your stuff, and why it's important to play into what they expect and what they want. Dungeon Masters, this applies to you too, so don't think you're excused! Remember that yo...

Brainstorming Ideas for your Novel

Salutations, my strange mysterious lovelies. We've been talking a lot about outlines and scene dissection recently, but tonight I want to take a moment to talk about brainstorming and how to drum up ideas to outline about in the first place.

After all, what good are outlines and guiding the fire if you can't even get the fire started?

Well, the good news is, you can. The bad news is, it's a skill to develop just like every other part of this nonsense.

Content Warnings: A healthy dose of irrevere...

Entertain Yourself With Your Outline

Salutations, my beautiful gathering of weirdos <3 I've been on a gaming kick the past couple of weeks, so I'm gonna swing back to the literature end of things for a minute. Let's talk about outlines. There's a lot floating around about how to make them, the structure of them and how important they are, but I'm not talking about that tonight.

Instead, we're going to focus on the outline as a form of entertainment to it's audience. IE, you. Because let's be honest, you are going to spend unto...

My Closest Friends are the Ones I've Gamed With...Here's Why

Salutations, my curious congregation. There's been a lot of talk floating around twitter about gate keeping and women in gaming, and I have a guess there was a specific incident behind it that we're not going to talk about or give any more press to here. Needless to say it was a shitgibbon throwing feces and the internet, in its infinite wisdom, saw fit to engage.

I don't. I'm not here to talk about that. But a lot of the people I'm talking about as I write this are women and many of them I ne...

4 Gift Ideas Your Assassin Will Love

Salutations, nerds. Here's a little tidbit you'll never believe in a million years; it's been a quiet week for me and I don't have anything  I particularly feel like ranting about over here. I gotta blog anyway, so here's some homebrew loot.

Here are 4 items your assassin will love, you know, on the off chance they have a birthday coming up or a big loot drop or you just really like to over prepare for the holidays.

Content Warnings: D&D loot. They were made with wetwork in mind, but p...

Putting Your Players in the Belly of the Beast

On Tuesday I talked about consenting to genre and being up front about what can happen in your campaign. Today, I want to talk about the best results that can happen when you do that.

Content Warning: I'm about to advise you to break the rules. As usual, irreverence, probably swearing, possibly weird metaphors if I feel like using those. A brief part at the end where I try to sell you something because capitalism. Let's dig in, shall we?



So. Tuesday's blog was all about how important it is to l...