In this follow-up to Giddy and Euphoric: Essays on Reading, Writing, and Ray Bradbury, Sean Taylor continues his fascination with the nuts and bolts of the writer's life.
Essays include:
- Introduction by October Santerelli
- The Sweaty-Toothed Madman: Reading Is Becoming; Writing Is Telling Who We Are
- The Great White Savior (Or Why It's Way Past Time To Retire Tarzan, Sheena, and The Last Samurai)
- Visceral Writing + Nostalgia = Effective Writing Every Time
- Envy and Imitation
- Help! I'm Stumped and I Don't Know What To Write!
- 15 Action/Adventure Tropes That Need To Die a Painful Death
- This Week's Theme Is, Well, Theme
- Bono and Flannery: Harder to Believe Than Go Crazy Tonight
- What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)
- Do, Do, Do, Da, Da, Da: The Day The Police Taught Me About Character Dialog
- The Centre Is Not Central—Normal Heroes Among Dragons
- The Description Toolbox: 3 Tools Every Writer Needs
- Close to the Vest—Embracing the Mystery in Your Fiction
- Writing for Comics—A Basic Primer for Newbs
- O' Captain, My Captain: Taming the Writers' Group Monsters
- 35 Books (Almost) Everybody Should Read
- My Backstory Story
- The ABC (Plots) of Ongoing Storytelling
- Wrote Rage
- Hard to Market, But It's Okay
- Paying Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, or Ruining the Magic Trick for All the Right Reasons
- Tightening the Tension
- Creating Religion in Your Stories
- Geek Culture: Leading the Way AND Pulling Us Back?!
- The Editing Onion
- My Diversity Soapbox (Or Don't You Throw That "Woke" Shade at Me)
- It’s the End of the Literary World As We Know It (But Don’t Be Afraid—It’s a Good Thing)
