In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Narrative Bumper Pool, with Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel, Howard, Dan, with special guests Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel who have extensive experience writing for games. This week they talk about writing for interactive stories, like tabletop RPG’s, or video games.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Warbreaker, Vivenna acknowledged a few hard truths about herself and her motivations. This week, in chapters 34 and 35, Lightsong muses, Siri worries, Blushweaver threatens, Bluefingers prevaricates, and Vivenna escapes—twice. Quite the party up in here!

The Twitter post archive for May is up to date.

Today’s poll, to be answered Friday, May 26th, will focus on writing advice. As always, if you have a question you’d like to get answered by Brandon, please leave a comment in whichever location (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, or Instagram) and I will add it to the list of potential questions.

Full questions:

• What advice do you have for spouses or significant others to help foster and support creative writing?
• Would you ever consider writing a book on writing?
• Don’t you think what makes magic “magical” is the mystery of it? How is a hard magic system different than technology?
• Was there ever a time when you had intended to kill off a character, but changed your mind because you liked them too much?
• My question is, in regards to your world building, how do you decide to go completely alien in your descriptions, cultures, creatures, etc and yet still use modern colloquialisms or terminology? For example… skyeels, you use the term “eel” which is a distinctly earth based animal. Then you also have chickens on Roshar. Then there are creatures like the lurg, which based on the description sounds like a sort of six-legged frog, yet there is no use of the term “frog” when referring to it.