Author: eliotpeper

• Please fix it!

  Emails like this are why I love my editor: The sunrise/moonset early scene near Santa Barbara. I checked and had actually noted it in my Spring comments; since it was not repaired, I assume that maybe I was ambiguous or at least not forceful enough. So let me be clear: you will lose the confidence…

• Pull a Single Thread, and the Universe Unravels

  When writing, the narrower your focus, the farther you can venture in its pursuit. In “Authority and American Usage,” David Foster Wallace’s book review of a dictionary deconstructs the complex feedback loop between language and culture. In “watermelons,” Andrea Castillo uses the eponymous fruit to cross disciplines and millennia exploring humanity’s relationship with water. In…

• How I Write Books

  I want to read a book. That particular book doesn’t exist. I write it. Thankfully, most of the time I want to read a book, it already exists, so I read it. * Complement with A Recipe for Adventure, the story behind Borderless, and Five Lessons I Learned Writing Veil. Get new posts via email:…

• Scholars of Causation

  I interviewed Stewart Brand about writing The Maintenance Race. The Maintenance Race tells the thrilling story of a 1968 solo sailing race around the world, a feat that had never before been attempted. It follows three competitors—the man who won, the man who chose not to win, and the man who cheated—illuminating what their respective…

• A Recipe for Adventure

  Welcome to my life/world which is stable until… …something disrupts it, launching me on… …a journey into the unknown where I’m beset by… …progressive complications that ultimately threaten what I care about most until… …all is lost and I must… …transform my life/world… …welcome to my new life/world. * Complement with A Brief Anatomy of…

• Heroes Are Whoever’s Left When Everyone Else Runs Away

  I interviewed Andy Weir about writing Project Hail Mary. Project Hail Mary follows an unlikely astronaut on a desperate mission to save the solar system from a spacefaring bacteria that eats sunlight. It’s an immensely entertaining adventure that will teach you more real science than you learned in high school. Never has a novel so…

• A Swing, a Miss, and a Burrito

  To whomever needs to hear this: I just took a big swing, gave it my all, and missed. I’m not gonna lie, it sucks. The details don’t matter, but this does: If I had known it would work at the outset, it wouldn’t have been worth doing. Making art requires taking real risks. Courage isn’t…

• Rugby

  I played rugby in high school. I was never particularly good, or even particularly passionate about it, but playing rugby taught me an important lesson that has stuck with me ever since. Growing up, I wasn’t a traditional geek or a traditional jock or really a traditional anything. I was curious, bookish, a little aloof,…

• Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone on writing This Is How You Lose the Time War

  This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a mind-expanding, heart-wrenching tale of dastardly intrigue and burgeoning romance that follows two supremely competent secret agents traveling through time to bend the arc of history toward their respective masters’ incompatible political ends. The story is a shining example of…

• Ten popular Bandwidth highlights, annotated

  A while back, Goodreads asked me to annotate ten of the most popular Kindle highlights in Bandwidth. I love snatching glimpses into other people’s creative processes, and these notes give you a sneak peek into mine. Let’s dive right in. The highlights from the novel are indented and my notes follow. There was a deeper…