Improbable Press Blog

By Sebastian Jack Hi! My name is Sebastian Jack, I’m a bilateral, above-knee amputee, and I use a wheelchair full-time. 15% of the world’s population (one billion people!) live with some form of disability. One fifth of them (between 110 – 190 million people) experience significant or profound disability. So, why don’t 15% of our fictional characters have disabilities? If you’re interested in writing complex, nuanced, disabled characters, here are some tips to get you started in the right direction! First things first: What is your character’s disability, and how did they acquire it? Do they have an amputation? If...

By Narrelle M Harris So many people expound so many rules about writing – and so much of it can be contradictory – that it’s not always easy to tell good advice from bad. Two reminders of this came my way recently. The first was a Facebook post by a writer I follow. Full of irritation at absolutist ‘rules’, he reeled out the ‘common wisdom’ writing advice, full of ‘never do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. The comments were full of people citing beloved works which broke those rules with enormous success. The second was when I read Daphne Du...

By Atlin Merrick EVERYONE LOVES CRYPTIDS! I’m sorry-not-sorry for yelling at you. Except— Everyone loves a cryptid! —that. That's the conclusion I come to after we closed our call for submissions for what will be our anthology Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging. Because for that single anthology we got 450 stories. And that's a slightly conservative count since many of the emails contain more than one story and do you know why? You Love Cryptids Over the five months of the open call we received submissions daily, story after story of cryptids both 'known' – hello Jersey devil, Mothman, and mermaid!...

By Atlin Merrick A thousand words a day.One thousand words a day.A thousand every day every day one thousand. That. There. The rule I lived by for two years. Several years ago, in an effort to become a better writer, I promised myself I'd write a thousand words a day for a year. When that went well, I continued on into two years and by early year three… …I was… …sometimes… …………falling behind. Because by year three I'd become deeply involved with fandom, going to meetups and conventions, I'd moved countries, and I'd started a degree program. So a thousand...

By Stella Elisei "Write what you know" is a duty... …if you are writing an article for a peer-reviewed journal. Do not unbridle your imagination then. But if you're writing for entertainment, I'll tell you something I know. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."  That's perhaps the most famous quote by the Latin playwright Terence. "I'm human, and I think nothing human is alien to me." Personally, I'll add that nothing extraterrestrial or mythological is alien to me, either. But that's just my taste for speculative fiction. If you're a writer...figuring out how other people might feel and...