Bad Lit Friends

This week, Bad Lit Friends gets all practical-like as we whack our way through the writing tools jungle: the good, the bad, and the ones that should absolutely come with a content warning. Up for dissection are the big hits and some notable misses across the full writing ecosystem: platforms, organizational tools, and book formatting software. Google Docs, Scrivener, and Vellum all get their momen...

In this episode, we wade into one of the filthiest pools in the bookish world: whether you can separate the art from the artist—and what supporting a problematic creator says about you, your values, and where your money goes. We wrestle with the complicated legacies of J.K. Rowling, Orson Scott Card, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, and several other writers whose work has meant a great deal to readers de...

We're back from our unplanned hiatus with most of our brains intact! This week we're diving into dialogue: how to make your characters sound like real live humans talking to each other as opposed to two robots exchanging plot information in a robot factory (beep boop). It’s not an easy nut to crack, and we’re not promising to hand out any nutcrackers, but we have a few clues. It is also, w...

We're not dead! Well, Kirk is only mostly dead, nursing the dreaded lurgy (mostly upright and occasionally coherent!) and Meagan is back from getting hitched in the Bay Area, so this week you get almost three minutes of us instead of a real episode. Meagan goes on a tangent about nasal swab Covid tests that gets very weird and very gross. No refunds on listening, sorry. The real episode — on d...

ATTENTION S'IL VOUS PLAÎT Bad Lit Friends is on a brief and extremely glamorous hiatus this week: Meagan got MARRIED and Madame Covid has captured Kirk in her warm, virulent embrace. Between a wedding and a plague, we decided the responsible thing to do was nothing. Hey, we're Gen X; slackerdom is our cultural inheritance. We should be back next week (fingers crossed) with all our usual nonsense....

Part Three of the Author Industrial Complex—we promise this is the last one! This week: the passion v. the grind (and what happens when your deeply beloved creative pursuit starts feeling like a second job you definitely didn’t apply for), performing positivity online when you’re dying inside, and introverts who want the world to read their deeply personal work but please don’t look at them direct...

We're back with Part 2 of The Author Industrial Complex, a series that was totally planned and not just us having too many feelings and very little discipline! This week, we discuss how to balance serving your readers without losing your mind or your voice (you can only choose one, so choose wisely); pen names for fun and profit*; why romance writing is for everyone; ARC reviewer entitlement;...

This week, Meagan is away, and Kirk is joined by fantasy author Anne Wells for an in-depth conversation about the emotional craft of fiction writing: how to bring all the feels instead of just pelting readers with plot points and explosions for 300 pages. We talked about interiority, emotional layering, flawed characters, trauma done well versus trauma...um...not done well, and why you should give...

This week we're talking about all the ways authors are pulled in opposing directions: branding, marketability, genre expectations, comp titles, platform anxiety, and the increasingly cursed reality that writing a book also requires becoming a product. We unpack the push-pull between art and commerce, why publishing wants your book to be both completely original and exactly like three recent be...

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! The Court of Bad Lit Friends is now in session, and the defendants have been waiting a looooong time for their day of reckoning. In this episode, we don our very snazzy judicial robes and put character archetypes on trial, because after five thousand years of showing up in every story ever told, it's time to ask some tough questions. Are these archetypes still earning their k...

Description: This week, we’re talking villains: the delicious ones, the flat ones, and the ones you love to ruin your main characters' lives with. We get into what separates a villain from an antagonist, why your best bad guys need motives beyond “mwahaha” and twirly mustaches, and how to make them compelling. We also talk about why the most interesting villains are usually just your protagoni...

Kirk is at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference this week, so Meagan has done the only possible thing and invited her best friend since college, playwright/screenwriter/cultural critic/general force of nature Regina Alexandra Robbins to come hang out. And hang out they do, in a conversation about writing across forms, making an actual career out of this whole storytelling thing, the deeply unhinged w...

This week we throw BookTok on the pyre. Meagan sacrificed her wholesome cats and makeup tutorials algorithm just to research this episode for you, dear listener. Now it's shadow daddies and Colleen Hoover. You’re welcome! And on Hotgos, we take a swing at Amazon, so we fully expect our packages to be thrown onto the roofs of our domiciles for the foreseeable future. Welcome to Bad Lit Friends....

This week we're talking to author Isaac Grijalva about his debut novel 6 ½ Days in the City , an LGBTQIA contemporary novel about a bisexual, burnt-out EMT who's finally confronting trauma and healing during a life-altering NYC vacation with friends. Isaac shares his experience self-publishing, writing authentic queer representation, balancing EMT work with getting ready to attend medical...

This week on Bad Lit Friends, we tackle the pressing question of what writers actually owe their readers. And sorry, it's not food. After catching up on the ongoing Mia Ballard AI witch hunt and why journalism is dead (and LinkedIn? Are you effing kidding me?), we break down the absolute, nonnegotiable reader expectations that readers expectate. We also explore genre, the necessity of content...

Ah, capitalism! BLF gets all topical as we dive into the Mia Ballard Shy Girl debacle and spoiler alert: we're not here to pile on Mia. We've got bigger, smellier fish to fry, starting with the Big Five publisher who somehow forgot that editors kinda-sorta are supposed to, like, edit? Oh no, that costs money, so whatevs, we guess. We talk about how Ballard is simultaneously the most and le...

This week we're revisiting some old Hot Gos, and seeing what's changed. Also a new hot gos that we hope to never revisit again because yuck. Welcome to Bad Lit Friends. We’re glad you’re here, even if none of us know what we’re doing. Bad Lit Friends was created and is hosted by Meagan Thompson-Mann and Kirk Rafferty. Show email: badlitfriends@gmail.com Bluesky: @badlitfriends.bsky.social....

This week, BLF's all about our agent wish list: all the things we wish literary agents would do better. (You're all perfect though! Utterly and thoroughly!) We are back in the trenches (deal with it, PubTips gatekeepers) and ready to tank our author careers before they get started because who doesn't feel like a soupçon of nihilism these days??? We have SO MANY THOUGHTS about query for...

In this episode, we explore the complex landscape of social media and why it's all evil evil evil. We talk about our own personal experiences with social media, going all the way back to the halcyon days of Usenet, MySpace, and forums, because we are oooold. HOT GOS: Should you refuse to read in a genre, write a book in that genre, and then crap all over the genre? The answer may surprise you!...

What's in your boneyard? This week we're talking about shelf novels, not-ready-for-primetime attempts, and all those beautiful disasters collecting dust in your Scrivener files. Join us as we confess to our abandoned manuscripts (Kirk's got a fantasy novel about Irish legends, Meagan's got EIGHT BOOKS in something called "the Melaverse"), discuss why sometimes quitters CA...

In this episode, we read some iconic opening lines, from timeless classics to modern favorites (we got you covered too, indies!), and why those first few words have so much pressure to be brilliant (nbd right?). We also give some well-deserved attention to epistolary novels and at least try to make the case for reading more broadly, even when it means stepping out of your comfort zone. We’re here...

After Meagan's car tries to murder her (and she still shows up to record because some people have PRIORITIES), we tackle something actually positive for once: the writing community! Well, we try to stay positive. This week we're exploring what writing communities are, why they matter, and how they keep us from feeling like dysfunctional, self-hating chaos goblins screaming "MUST WRITE...

In this episode, we chat about our own writing journeys: what went wrong, what went right, and what we really wish we’d known back in the day. We talk discipline (no, not that discipline, get your mind out of the gutter--or don't, we're not your boss), luck and timing, and whether writers actually have to be on social media or if we can all just, like, not . Along the way, we swap stories...

Rejection letters: they suck! But also they're not the end of the world! (Trust us, we've been there. Repeatedly.) Join us for a loosey-goosey conversation about what you can learn from form and personalized rejections from literary agents, the agony of being ghosted, and why your "dream agent" might not actually be your dream agent at all. Kirk shares war stories from 200+ queri...

In this episode, we dive into the oft-dreaded topic of comparison titles, or 'comps,' which are essential for writers looking to query agents. We talk about the importance of comps in understanding market placement and how they can help writers articulate their book's unique qualities. We also discuss finding appropriate comps, the pitfalls of choosing titles that are either too obscur...