Book Review: The Franchise

A land filled with magic and dragons and wizards and warriors. Thousands of people live and work within its borders, fearful of their enemies and loyal to their king.

The classic fantasy world of The Malicarn has been brought to life on the big screen in a series of phenomenally successful blockbuster movies, almost entirely populated by characters in total belief that their sham fantasy lives are real. A fan-favorite actor finds himself doubting the studio's work, but this franchise has an almost unstoppable momentum, and bringing freedom to a population that already believes itself to be free won’t be as easy as he thinks.

Book Review: The Midnight Train

No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were.

For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice. Before he gave it all away.

He wishes he could go back and live differently.

But to do so risks everything...

The Midnight Train by Matt Haig will be published May 26, 2026. Viking Penguin provided an early galley for review.

Book Review: The Emotion Thesaurus (2nd edition)

One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much.

If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes:

• body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for 130 emotions that cover a range of intensity from mild to severe, providing innumerable options for individualizing a character’s reactions
• a breakdown of the biggest emotion-related writing problems and how to overcome them
• advice on what should be done before drafting to make sure your characters’ emotions will be realistic and consistent
• instruction for how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues

Book Review: DC Super Hero Girls - High School Reunion

It’s the 10th anniversary of DC Super Hero Girls: Finals Crisis, and modern-day, grown-up Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, Harley, Ivy, and Beast Boy have received invitations to the most exclusive party in town—their high school reunion. Distracted by all their grown-up responsibilities, the group hasn’t been able to get together for a while, and they are more excited than ever to see their friends again!

But this “reunion” isn’t what it seems. No one else is present when they arrive for the party! Who could have summoned everyone to Super Hero High? What is really going on? To find the answers to their questions and the way out of this trap, the heroes will have to take a walk down memory lane. But will this deep dive into their past bring the heroes back to their B.F.F. ways or reopen old wounds?

Book Review: Plotting Your Fantasy Novel

Do you have great worldbuilding and character ideas, but don’t know what should actually happen in your story? Have you started writing a book, only to get stuck halfway through? Do you have cool scene concepts, but don’t know how to link them together, or what to do between your big plot moments? If you said yes to any of those questions, then this book is for you.

Following a 9-Point Plot Structure, writers are show how to build their characters and plots in unison, allowing the stories to unfold in an organic, cohesive fasion. This process draws from the author's experience publishing over four fantasy novels, teaching 5000+ writers through live classes and self-paced courses, and making hundreds of in-depth YouTube videos about fantasy writing.

Book Review: Trudeau and Doonesbury

For more than 50 years, Doonesbury has helped drive the national conversation. The first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Trudeau’s sprawling narrative featuring a host of beloved characters has reflected America back to itself, capturing the highlights and lowlights of American politics and culture with wit and penetrating insight. And as Doonesbury’s characters aged alongside their creator, Trudeau became one of the preeminent chroniclers of the Baby Boom generation.

Biographer Joshua Kendall tells the story of the cartoonist and what drove him to put pen to paper. He traces Trudeau’s boyhood in the Adirondack Mountains, his teenage angst in prep school, and his formative years at Yale, where he began drawing his iconic strip. And he shows the changing world it reflected; Doonesbury began appearing in papers nationwide in 1970, and big events, from Watergate to the the war in Vietnam, fueled its popularity and its significance.

Book Review: X-Men - Elsewhen (vol 1 of 3)

In Volume 1 of X-Men: Elsewhen, the Dark Phoenix Saga is over and Phoenix is alive?!

Diverging from the epic finale of the original storyline from 1984, X-Men: Elsewhen presents a universe where Jean Grey’s powers and intellect have been greatly reduced, and from there, everything you thought you know about the X-Men is forever changed.

John Byrne’s monumental return to the X-Men heads in entirely new and surprising directions, as the X-Men head back to the Savage Land, face their climactic adventure with the Sentinels, and contend with special guest–stars such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four along the way. Byrne wrote and penciled every page, and inked multiple chapters of this three volume series.

Book Review: Marvels - The Novelization

This is the Marvel Universe, where the ordinary and fantastic interact daily. This is the world of Marvels—one of the most important and bestselling stories in Marvel Comics history, which Stan Lee described in his introduction to the first collected edition as “innovative, brilliantly conceived, and skillfully executed." Over 30 years later, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’ groundbreaking comic book series Marvels gets a long-awaited novelization by Steve Darnall, author of Uncle Sam and Ross’s writing partner on the original proposal.

Marvels was a landmark series when it was first published—peeling back the curtain on Marvel’s history. It’s a story told from the perspective of an everyman character—news photographer Phil Sheldon—who chronicles a world full of costumed superhumans, providing an on-the-ground view of events in the Marvel Universe as they unfold. Darnall’s prose perfectly captures the magic of Busiek and Ross’ original story, offering insights and background previously untold in the comic book.

Book Review: A Game of Luck

The puzzling murder of a beloved teacher leaves Detroit homicide detective Sam Roma searching for answers. To her chagrin, not only does Sam have a murder to solve, she's been assigned a new homicide investigator, Tom Green, who comes with his own set of problems and challenges. As Tom makes a series of rookie mistakes, Sam wonders if she's up to mentoring a partner with personal struggles—one who she suspects is involved in departmental politics.

To top it off, Sam's personal guilt over her own history intersects with the conflicts faced by the middle school students close to the murder. She needs to navigate complicated relationships and face memoires that have haunted her for years while keeping her family's secret safe.

Book Review: The Fiction Blueprint

You have a story in your head. Maybe it’s been there for months. Years. You’ve read craft books. Watched videos. Joined writing communities. But the story stays stuck—because you don’t have a clear path from idea to finished book.

Ian Stevens walked that path nine times. Along the way, he kept notes—what worked, what didn’t, what got him unstuck when everything felt broken. Those notes became a course: The Fiction Blueprint. It covers everything from first idea to published book. 13 modules, templates, and the exact process he used.

Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced — start where you are. Go deeper when ready.

Book Review: Dirty 20

Tommy Fugue never cared for the family business. But when his fathe Big Al, aka King of the Denver Streets, assigns him the “summer job” of laundering money online, Tommy figures he can list some fake projects on FunFunder, pledge them with zombie accounts, and clean a dirty $20,000 in time for college in the fall. Unfortunately for Tommy, he’s more creative than he thought. Just as he’s about to give his father’s capos a progress report, he sees that a roleplaying game he mocked up using his mom’s old artwork has been funded to the tune of $650,000 and counting.

The only thing scarier than an angry Big Al is a Big Al that smells cash and family bonding time. Voluntold by their mercurial boss to assist, various criminals and killers help playtest and produce Tommy’s 1,000 Blades of Tergivers RPG in the hopes they can truly turn a dirty twenty into legit millions. But when Tommy realizes that being game master might help him uncover what these criminals know about his mother’s disappearance, it’s Game On.