The Curious Engineer

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Counter Craft

countercraft.substack.com

fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books, other things. Click to read Counter Craft, by Lincoln Michel, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalGeneral

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254 from 11 Feb 2021 to 29 Oct 2026
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weekly (40 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 32

  1. Three Great Recent Gothic Novels You May Not Have Read
  2. Of Course It’s the Screens. Who Are We Kidding?
  3. Processing: How Adam Wilson Wrote Fail Sons
  4. The Roots of the Novel Are Parody, Pastiche, and Play
  5. Processing: How Nicholas Russell Wrote Observer
  6. Sweat the Technique: On Writing Process and Possibilities
  7. Processing: How Josh Riedel Edited Thirty Cabins
  8. Stitching Up the Creature; Or, the Horrors of Revision
  9. Processing: How Paul Tremblay Wrote Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
  10. Principles of Plotting Part IV: Intersection and Redirection
  11. Principles of Plotting Part III: Variation
  12. There Are More than Five POVs
  13. The Ghostwriter in the Machine, LLM Author Psychosis, and Other Saturday Sundries
  14. Processing: How Hannah Lillith Assadi Wrote Paradiso 17
  15. LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further)
  16. Scavenging in the Media Wastelands: Or, Substacking While Trying to Make a Living Writing
  17. On Making Money (Or Not) Writing
  18. Why BookScan Is Different from Book Sales (Which Are Different from Royalty Statements)
  19. The Principles of Plotting Part II: Oscillation
  20. I Loved this Novel About Digging Up Frozen Soldiers in 19th-Century Prussia and You Might Too
  21. What Memoir Scandals Tell Us about Two LLM Writing Scandals
  22. Interview: How Naomi Huffman and Julia Ringo Run Hagfish
  23. What It Means that Hachette Just Canceled an AI Novel
  24. MFA vs. Publishing Round 2,000
  25. Processing: How Andrew Martin Wrote Down Time
  26. The View from Inside: On Adding Interiority to Your Fiction
  27. What Not Reading Does to Your Writing
  28. Surf's Up in Slop City
  29. Why Literature Needs a Punk Rock Mindset
  30. Why "Plot" Isn't a Four-Letter Word: The Principles of Plotting Part I
  31. Don't Draft Shakespeare into Your Genre Wars
  32. Why You Should Read Gene Wolfe (and Where to Start)

2025 50

  1. Thoughts on Publishing a Novel in 2025
  2. Processing: How Brandon Taylor Wrote Minor Black Figures
  3. The Best Books I Read in 2025 (That Weren't Published in 2025)
  4. Books as Art Projects
  5. Literary Philosophy and Philosophical Literature
  6. Short Little Difficult Books
  7. Interview: Fisher the Bookseller Explains How Bookstores Decide Which Books to Sell
  8. The Counter Craft Halloween Horror Writing Guide
  9. Processing: How Erin Somers Wrote The Ten Year Affair
  10. Processing: How Dan Chaon Wrote One of Us
  11. Shirley Jackson and the Eerie Omniscient Narrator
  12. To Understand What Books Are Published, You Must Understand How Books Are Sold
  13. The Book Club Industrial Complex, Speculative Detectives, Remembering Maxine Clair, and Other Sunday Sundries
  14. Style Is More than Sentences
  15. Scattered Thoughts on the State of Book Reviews
  16. Criticism in the Age of AI
  17. Processing: How Mads Gobbo and Miles Klee Wrote Double Black Diamond
  18. The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature
  19. Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop
  20. Processing: Why Benjamin Percy Is Writing a Novel as a Newspaper with Stephen King
  21. Processing: How Mattie Lubchansky Wrote and Illustrated Simplicity
  22. Why Boredom Is Good (for Writers)
  23. Brooks, Books, and the Imagined Realties of Publishing
  24. Is Your Worldbuilding Up To Code?
  25. The Forever Dying and the Always Dead; or, Literary Fiction and the Novel
  26. Interview: Editor Sean deLone on How Modern Publishing Actually Works
  27. What's Not to Like about "Unlikeable Characters"?
  28. A Simple Rule for Using AI in Art
  29. The Writer as Chimera (and Where Substack Fits In)
  30. Defending Adverbs Exuberantly if Conditionally
  31. Substack Summer, AI Slop, and the State of Selling Books
  32. Newspapers Are Recommending AI-Hallucinated Novels
  33. Fairy Tales Before Fantasy Become Tropes
  34. Metallic Realms Lands! And Thoughts on Writing for Yourself Instead of the Market
  35. The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing
  36. The Strange Shadow of Kafka's Parables and Paradoxes
  37. How to Read a Royalty Statement
  38. Processing: How Julia Elliott Wrote Hellions
  39. Processing: How Kevin Nguyen Wrote Mỹ Documents
  40. Processing: How Vauhini Vara Wrote Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
  41. What We Write About When We Write About Writers
  42. MFA vs. LLM: Is OpenAI's Metafiction Short Story Actually "Good"?
  43. Is the American Bibliography Shrinking?
  44. Reflections on Four Years of Counter Craft
  45. Processing: How Sam Bett Translated Osamu Dazai
  46. Why ChatGPT Is a Balloon and the Book Is a Bicycle
  47. A Luminous, Brave, and Unputdownable Article about Blurbs
  48. Fix Your Hearts or Die!: A Short Ode to David Lynch (RIP)
  49. Recommendation: The Odyssey (Read by Ian McKellen)
  50. Art in the Age of Slop

2024 39

  1. My 2024 in Reading (Plus Lessons from Tokarczuk's Prose)
  2. 2024 Year-End Writing Round-Up
  3. Turning Off the TV in Your Mind
  4. Four Translated Novels I Enjoyed This Year
  5. Imitation Games
  6. Adjusting the Levels in Revision
  7. Processing: How David Small Illustrated and Wrote The Werewolf at Dusk
  8. Processing: How Jeff VanderMeer Wrote Absolution
  9. Metallic Realms Cover Reveal: Coming May 2025
  10. Han Kang Wins the Nobel!
  11. Writing Terror into Your Horror
  12. Angela Carter and the "So Fucking What?" Approach to Writing
  13. Processing: How Tony Tulathimutte Wrote Rejection
  14. Three Kafkaesque Novels from Around the World
  15. Art Without Intention
  16. What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last
  17. Processing: How Helen Phillips Wrote Hum
  18. Writing For, Within, and Against the Market
  19. Ramen Westerns and Thematic Cores
  20. Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era
  21. Seeing with an Artist's Eye
  22. Processing: How Tracy O'Neill Wrote Woman of Interest
  23. Comps and Circumstance
  24. Much Ado About MFAs
  25. Novels in Unusual Forms
  26. More Publishing Facts You May Not Know
  27. Yes, People Do Buy Books
  28. Processing: How Justin Taylor Wrote Reboot
  29. Processing: How Ryan Chapman Wrote The Audacity
  30. On Productivity
  31. What's American Fiction Without the Short Story?
  32. Processing: How Rita Bullwinkel Wrote Headshot
  33. Dune Names Are Good, Actually
  34. Four Books I Loved Coming Out This Spring
  35. The First and Best Writing Advice I Ever Received
  36. The Novel as Shaggy Dog Joke
  37. On Reviewing Books
  38. Who Is Reading What and Why
  39. Why Your Narrator Should Be a Weird Little Freak

2023 48

  1. Structure and Its Discontents
  2. Processing: How Ed Park Wrote Same Bed Different Dreams
  3. Remembering Gabe Hudson
  4. A Year-End Writing Round-Up
  5. Processing: How Bennett Sims Wrote Other Minds and Other Stories
  6. Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick
  7. Y'all Wanna See a Death of the Author Body?
  8. Underpinning Your Horror in the Uncanny
  9. Processing: How Dan Sinykin Wrote Big Fiction
  10. New Novel and Other News
  11. Some Surreal Books from Around the World
  12. Write for Your Best Readers Instead of Your Worst Readers
  13. That Viral "Most Books Sell < 12 Copies" Claim Again
  14. Fear of the Surreal
  15. Fantastic Modes; Or, Is Magical Realism Just Urban Fantasy?
  16. Algorithm America (a short story)
  17. The Clarifying Cut
  18. What Algorithms Can't Tell You about Art
  19. On the State of Literary Magazines
  20. Better Said than Dead: Quick Tips on Dialogue Tags
  21. Processing: How Henry Hoke Wrote Open Throat
  22. How Literature Lasts (and Popular Myths of Popularity)
  23. How Novellas Became Novels
  24. Goodreads Has No Incentive to be Good
  25. The Loquacious Precision of Cormac McCarthy
  26. Two New Short Stories
  27. Yes, Metaphors Should Actually Make Sense
  28. Readers Aren't Flocking to Chatbot Novels Just Yet
  29. The Endgame for A.I. Is Clear: Rip Off Everyone
  30. Calculating When Your Book Will "Earn Out"
  31. Publishing and Persistence
  32. Lit Mags and Money (or the Lack of It)
  33. Ye Olde Fantasy Language Problem
  34. Publishing Numbers Big and Small
  35. On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations
  36. What Do People Really Mean by "Invisible Prose"?
  37. Write-Off What You Know
  38. The Library of Blather
  39. Necromance Your Darlings
  40. Friday Sundries: Hugo Awards, ChatGPT's "Last Hope," and Dahl De-Bowdlerized
  41. The Flood of ChatGPT Crap About to Clog Up Publishing
  42. The Roald Dahl Edits Aren't About Anything Except Corporate Profits
  43. The Unnecessary Is the Only Thing Necessary in Art
  44. A Literary Fairy Tale Syllabus
  45. Fairy Tale as MFA Antidote
  46. Processing: How Martin Riker Wrote The Guest Lecture
  47. Maybe the Book Doesn't Need to Be "Disrupted" in the First Place?
  48. TV Causalities: Avoiding Bad Habits from Visual Media

2022 36

  1. What Makes an Unfilmable Novel?
  2. A Counter Craft Year-End Roundup
  3. The Only Sure Thing with AI Is Writing Will Get Blander and the Rich Will Get Richer
  4. Processing: How Elisa Gabbert Wrote Normal Distance
  5. Three Great Books You Might Have Missed (Plus One to Put on Your Radar)
  6. Clearing Up the Clutter: On Removing "Trite Physicality" from Stories
  7. The Spectrum of Screams: Horror Terms 101
  8. Data Won't Save Art
  9. Understanding the Reader Without Pandering to the Reader
  10. Genres Are Historical and Cultural, Not Scientific
  11. No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies
  12. House of the Discourse
  13. Why Do People Think Scandalous Novels Couldn't Be Published Today?
  14. MFA vs. IRS
  15. Outsourcing Originality
  16. Processing: How Vauhini Vara Wrote The Immortal King Rao
  17. Why Does It Take So Long to Publish a Book?
  18. When Will Novels Fix Society Already?
  19. Is Genre Defined by Content or Worldview?
  20. How Chandler Klang Smith Writes with Robots
  21. The Classics Are Whatever We Want Them to Be
  22. The Rise of the Robot Writers?
  23. Alexander Chee on How to Write a Novel
  24. Let Me Tell You About "Show Don't Tell"
  25. Conflict Is Only One Way to Think About Stories
  26. The Grotesque Sublime
  27. The One Rule of Fiction Writing
  28. Processing: How Matt Bell Wrote Refuse to Be Done
  29. When Science Fiction and Fantasy Envisions Life Beyond Capitalism
  30. What We Lose When We Lose Literary Magazines
  31. Do Blurbs Actually Work?
  32. Some Words About Word Counts
  33. Why You Need to Read Fiction To Write Fiction
  34. Notes on the Speculative Epic
  35. Worldbuilding and the Whims of History
  36. How Writing Is Like Playing Hades

2021 49

  1. Just a Little End of the Year Round-Up
  2. Plotter, Pantser, Scribbler, Scribe
  3. Writing Is about the Right Words, not the MOST Words
  4. Did Anyone "Invent" Science Fiction?
  5. Much Ado about MFAs
  6. Fairy Tales and the Fictionness of Fiction
  7. Three (More) Great Books You Might Have Missed
  8. Processing: How Calvin Kasulke Wrote Several People Are Typing
  9. The Superhero in History Dilemma
  10. Schrödinger's 100k Author Advance
  11. Kicking Over the Ladder in Your Mind
  12. For Sale: Kidney Story. Never Authorized.
  13. Sales Numbers, Goodreads Reviews, and Other Ways to Drive an Author Mad
  14. The Long, Messy Road To Publishing My Novel
  15. Strange Methods: Zadie Smith's First Twenty Pages
  16. Substack and the Return (?) of Serialized Fiction
  17. On Rejections, Rejections, and Rejections
  18. Everything I've Learned about Being a "Professional" Writer in One Post
  19. The Plot Against Plotting
  20. (Character) Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
  21. No the CIA Didn't Invent "Show Don't Tell"
  22. Maybe It's Time to Admit People Just Like Books?
  23. Art Should Be a Doorway, Not a Mirror
  24. Strange Methods: César Aira's "Flight Forward"
  25. Strange Methods: Michael Moorcock's 3-Day Novel
  26. Morality Plays and Goodreads Threats
  27. Genre as Story Engine
  28. Twin Peaks and Embracing Artistic Accidents
  29. Chekhov’s Gundam
  30. How Much Money Do Authors Actually Earn?
  31. Gabagool and Malpropisms: Dialogue Lessons from The Sopranos
  32. The Five-Car Metaphor Pile-Up
  33. Is 5,000 a lot of books?
  34. Novels and Novellas and Tomes, Oh My!
  35. Three Books You Might Have Missed
  36. A Long Post about Short Stories (and Magazines)
  37. Some Words about Awards
  38. Let's Blow Up Freytag's Pyramid
  39. Genre Jargon: How the SFF and Literary Worlds Speak about Themselves and Each Other
  40. Worldbuilding Doesn’t Need to Build Everything
  41. The Value of Boring Sentences
  42. Dumb yet Brilliant Books
  43. Everyone Wants Art, No One Wants Artists to be Paid
  44. Space on the Page: On Emphasis in Fiction
  45. Invisible Architecture
  46. Worldbuilding in the Real World
  47. A Defense of Adverbs
  48. Feeling Artists
  49. What I'm doing here...