Article Index

An index of Andrew’s writing on Medium (not counting shortform or photos) as of: December 27th, 2022.

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Topic lists

• Photography
• Life in China
• Adoption Stories
• Psychedelia
• Electronic Gaming
• Crypto Skeptic
• Autism
• Indie Excavation
• Serial Fiction

Original fiction

The Empathy series

• Life is an Experiment: The Remnant Pieces
• Analysis: The Remnant Pieces — Part I
• Analysis: The Remnant Pieces — Part II
• Analysis: The Remnant Pieces — Part III

Short stories

• The Limit of Tyranny
• Overdue Notice
• Comments on “Bot Domination: The Future of Spam and Filters”
• A Dirge for the Prairie
• Distance is a Fallacy
• Dissolving Night
• The Haunted Empire
• The Path in the Dragon’s Wake
• A Pleasant Night on Ichorous Waves
• The Hermit and the Songbird
• The Angel of El Escorial
• Cheery Little Monochrome World
• The Ego Collector
• Kill Screen
• Under a Spectral Moon
• Real-Time
• Infiltrated by Voices

Flash fiction

• Memories are Mere Proteins
• Maxie
• Firstborn
• Halted
• A Flower for a Lost Grave
• Through Destruction
• The Baleful Box
• The Wayfarer
• Thunderheads
• A View to the Terminus

Fiction writing advice

Collections

• Mastering Flash Fiction: Planning, designing and publishing the shortest of short fiction ($0.99)

Craft of writing

• In Search of the Optimal Chapter Length
• Four Simple Tips to Get Started in Flash Fiction
• A Brief Guide to Worldbuilding (And Why It’s Not That Important)
• Making Your Mark in Modern Serial Fiction
• Five Things to Remember When Writing Epistolary Fiction
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Dialogue Tags
• The Risky Multi-POV Style: Five Things to Avoid
• The Curse of Writing Short
• Four Subtle Tricks to Improve Character Voice
• On Writing Panic
• Empathy is the Mother of Good Dialogue
• The Things You Can Learn from Hack Writers
• Four Empathy-Building Exercises to Improve Dialogue
• So You Want to Write a Serial: Before Your First Post
• Four Methods to Help Readers Navigate Your Serial
• Hypertext Fiction: The Past and Future of the Internet’s Own Tales
• The Do’s and Don’ts of Exposition in Literature
• Four Simple Steps to Develop Ideas for Flash Fiction

Promotion, distribution and rights

• Boosting Your Short Fiction Through Audio
• Fourteen Essential Posts for Your Blog Writing
• Creative Commons for Writers: Worthwhile or Not?
• Four Ways to Turn a Profit on a Free Book
• The Six Rejections You Get in Genre Markets
• Is the Speculative Fiction Market Getting Harder?
• Support Your Fiction: Five Approaches to Self-Promotion
• What is Realistic Fiction? Characteristics and Style

Miscellaneous writing essays

• No One Wants to Steal Your Book
• Postmortem for a Mortally Wounded Novel
• The Hermit Empire of the Publishing Industry
• Eight Takeaways From a Publisher’s Rejection

Essays on China

Collections

• Surviving the Dragon: Essays on Life in China ($0.99)

Advice articles

• No, I Can’t Help You Get an Asian Girlfriend
• A Beginner’s Guide to Baijiu
• Destroy the Laowai: On China’s Drinking Culture
• How Could You Ask THAT? Tactful Speech Across Cultures
• The Indoor Fog: Smoking in China
• Not Quite the FDA: Nutritional Facts in China
• A Brief Note on China’s Ongoing PowerPoint Obsession
• Know Your Own Stereotype
• Date Night in China: Where to Take Your Sweetheart
• The Ritual: Tea Culture in China
• Investigating Chinese Bar Culture

Personal experiences

• On Being a Novelty
• The Maniac Next Door: My First Christmas Abroad
• Dancing the White Monkey Waltz
• Willfully Lost in Huangshan: On the Merits of Wandering
• The Quiet Enigma of the Fake Chinese Books
• Transpacific: My First Night Abroad
• Someone Please Explain These Fake Chinese Schoolgirls to Me
• Another Christmas in the Middle Kingdom
• Sampling a Fake Chinese Whiskey
• Chinese Students Keep Occupying My Classrooms
• My Chinese Students Hand Over Their Homework With Both Hands
• The Things I Left in China
• Please Give Me Your WeChat: Social Media in China
• When Water is a Blessing
• The Chinese New Year Gala: A Travel Story

Miscellaneous articles

• A Crisis of Harmony
• You Don’t Need a Foreigner to Show Flash Cards to Your Kids
• What the Western Press Doesn’t Get about China and Video Games
• The Quest for the Perfect Chinese Pizza Place
• The Dragon’s Tutelage: Chinese Students in Their Own Words
• What Comes Next in China’s Education Scene?
• What Are Your Plans for Shopping Armageddon?
• Personal Opinions and China’s Culture of Deference
• Hard Luggage and the Chinese Class Divide
• Lucky Sixes: The Chinese-Western Superstition Divide
• China’s Curious Impulse Buy Sections
• Sharing the Sidewalk: Parking Places in China
• Why Do My Chinese Students Sort Themselves by Sex?
• Literature in China: What People Read and Why
• China’s Garbage Situation
• Chinese Malls: The Weird and the Wonderful
• The Pleasures of Getting Lost
• An Ode to a Two Gallon Container of Fine Chinese Liquor
• Nine Key Differences Between High Schools in China and the West
• A Twelve-Course Lesson on Food in China
• Xiaolongxia: On Chinese Crayfish
• An Introduction to Chinese Breakfast
• The Chinese Economy and the Struggles of the Youth

Electronic games

Collections

• A Population in Pixels: Essays on the Craft of Video Games ($0.99)

Independent games

• Lost Sacred Gems: The State of Indie Games in 2022 and Beyond
• Eight Indie Games That Don’t Get Enough Love
• Indie Excavation No. 1: Dark Christmas
• Indie Excavation No. 2: Post-Sale Madness
• Indie Excavation No. 3: NES Throwbacks
• Indie Excavation No. 4: The Triumph of Simplicity
• Indie Excavation No. 5: Platformers on Parade
• Vampire Survivors: A Study of an Indie Phenomenon
• Indie Excavation No. 6: A Little Bit Adorable

Reviews and retrospectives

• The Unsinkable Team Fortress 2
• Bright Memory: Infinite is Brief but Awesome
• Breaking Kaycee’s Mod: A Look at Inscryption’s Next Phase
• Monochrome Fantasia: Life in the Age of the Game Boy

Miscellaneous essays

• On Borrowed Games and Save File Ethics
• Replay Value and the Joy of Rediscovery
• Through the Invisible Wall: Video Games in China
• In Praise of Instruction Manuals
• Legends of the Middle Kingdom
• The Nostalgia Cabinet
• Clones: The Past and Future of Unofficial Consoles
• Melody of the Machine: The Music of Video Games
• Secrets in the Files: Epistolary Stories in Video Games
• Arcade Oddities: Hero of Steel
• A Brief Tour of the Chinese Arcade Scene
• Grizzly Bosses: Beating Inscryption’s Most Unbearable Challenge
• Why Aren’t Platformers Selling Better?

The Internet and Media

• A Crypto Skeptic Plays the Market for 2.5 Years
• The Crypto Skeptic Scores Big
• The Crypto Skeptic Takes a Hit
• The Crypto Skeptic Formulates a Strategy
• 25 Years of Being Disappointed by the Internet
• Dating at the Internet: A Deconstruction
• The Crypto Skeptic Studies a Bear Market
• Have You Ever Considered Just NOT Being on Facebook?
• The Crypto Skeptic Lands an Embarrassing Win
• The Crypto Skeptic Gets Out
• Quit Whining and Just Delete Your Damn Twitter Account Already
• Twitter Is on the Verge of Becoming a Haven for Scammers

Music

• Facing Death at a Weezer Concert
• How R.E.M. Pushed Me Into the Spotlight
• REM’s Monster: Music Discovery in a Small Town
• Where Did You First Hear Talib Kweli?
• Lessons Learned From a Window Seat
• The Dorkiest Mix Tape I’ve Ever Made
• The Singles Ranked: Linkin Park
• This is How a Rural White Kid Starts Listening to Public Enemy
• Ending Strong: Nine Legendary Songs That Closed Out an Album
• The Worst Performing Albums From 15 Best-Selling Bands
• Nine Huge Bands That Took Many Albums to Break Out
• Eight More Significant Songs That Concluded an Album

Politics

• Information is Treachery: Censorship in American Schools
• In the American Firearms Debate, Suicides are Invisible
• After Four Years in China, I Really Haven’t Missed Political Ads
• On the Increasingly Partisan Views of American Education
• That’s Just Life in the People’s Republic of Florida
• Toward a Better Political Spectrum Chart
• More on that New, Improved Political Spectrum Chart

Misc. personal writing

Adoption articles

• I Outlived the Mother I Never Knew
• Why Is It so Hard to Talk to My Adoptive Parents About My Birth Mother?
• Phone Numbers for Familiar Strangers
• Four Things That This Adoptee Wishes You Understood
• Gathering the Branches of My Family Tree
• Seeking My Father, Finding a Brother

Autism articles

• Everyone Thinks I’m Autistic Except Me
• There Was a Secret in My Strange Walk
• Is It Worth It for Me to Pursue an ASD Diagnosis at This Point?
• On Passing as Typical
• Canine Sensibilities: Of Dogs and Autism
• ASD, Nausea and the Food Police
• Singing With My Hands
• My Brain Doesn’t Think I Need Eight Hours of Sleep
• Solitude and ASD: When the Loners Get Lonely
• Fiction, Autism and My Inglorious Writing Career
• Inappropriate Affect from the Inside Out
• Three Adult Autism Tests for Those Considering a Diagnosis
• The Numbers That Rule My World
• Please Love Me: Dating With ASD
• Blunt Affect and the Consequences of Not Smiling Enough

Personal experiences

• Questionable Internet Acid: My First Psychedelic Episode
• Unusual Lessons: Picking My First Lock
• My Brief Career in Music Photography
• What I Learned Amid the Peaks and Pines
• The Long Bus Ride Back to the Old Days
• Headspace
• Pardon Me While I Continue Dying
• On Violence Against Art
• My Secondhand Adventures with a Shroom-Headed Girl
• The Endless March of Midnight
• The Halloween Where I Turned the Tables on Some Bullies
• Temporal Disintegrated Psychic Art
• The Sweet Old Girl Who Waited in the Cold
• Merry Christmas, the Car’s in A Ditch
• The Middle-Aged Bully Who Turned Me Into a Rebel
• Playing Dungeons & Dragons With Mormons
• When I Had the Nerve to Fail With Flair

Other articles

• Survival Bias and the Motivational Blind Spot
• Chemically-Aided Meditation: The Quiet Side of Psychedelia
• On Squirrels: The Joy of the Unwilling Photo Subject
• In Honor of my 50th Rejection from a Major Spec Magazine
• The Virtue of Giving Up
• Have You Found The Fabulist?
• How to Tell People How to be Famous
• A Glorious Flaw Amid Perfection
• Misanthropy is Creatively Dead
• In Consideration of My 1000th Rejection
• On the Merits of Non-Productive Work
• I Don’t Understand Racism
• Nine Levels of Unpublished Authors
• A Personal History in Nine Mobile Phones
• Photographing the Elusive Ground Squirrel
• Americans Never Leave High School
• I Miss Those Awful Old Blogs
• I Wrote This Article to Put a Link at the Bottom
• I Destroyed My Most Personal Story. Here’s Why