Lincoln Michel

3 weeks ago | countercraft.substack.com | Lincoln Michel

Recently, I’ve been thinking about adverbs. Everyone hates adverbs. But I say they hate them foolishly and incorrectly. I called this newsletter Counter Craft because I wanted to offer counterintuitive craft advice. One of my earliest Counter Craft articles was titled “A Defense of Adverbs,” and I thought about that old post again when I saw some recent adverb discourse. I try not to repeat topics in this newsletter.

1 month ago | countercraft.substack.com | Lincoln Michel

Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books were fake. There is no Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee, Boiling Point by Rebecca Makkai, The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, or The Rainmakers by Percival Everett, among other invented titles. The article was not only generated by ChatGPT (or similar program), but clearly unedited.

1 month ago | lithub.com | Lincoln Michel

It is conventional wisdom that novels are either plot-driven or character-driven, but I’ve long been fascinated with the way structure can drive a story. Structure is the vessel we pour our narrative into. It goes a long way to determining its shape. Unusual structures produce surprising novels. There’s nothing wrong with Freytag’s Pyramid, I suppose, but sometimes you need to flip the pyramid on its head or blow it up and build something else altogether.

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Lincoln Michel

15 hours agoThe President has named a new Acting Librarian of Congress. It's his former defense lawyer. Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, has been appointed as the acting Librarian of Congress by President Trump, according to a spokesperson at the Department of Justice. The permanent post of Librarian of Congress must be confirmed by the Senate.

1 month ago | countercraft.substack.com | Lincoln Michel

Metallic Realms lands on bookstore shelves next week! The novel has received very flattering reviews so far from Esquire (“Brilliant”), Publishers Weekly (“riveting”), Elle (“hilariously clever”), Booklist (“just plain wonderful”), and elsewhere.If you have any interest, I hope you’ll consider preordering or picking up on pub day. More information here. There have been many takes debating the most important literary trend of the century so far.