Columns
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10 Horror Stories Nobody Wants to Read
September 9th, 2016
You read enough slush and you’ll start seeing the same stories over and over. The same plots. The same characters. The same scenes. Beat by miserable beat.
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Five Kick-Ass Small-Press Books That Deserve a Bigger Readership
September 8th, 2016
There are many great books brought out by big publishers that get big press, big awards, and big readerships. (One could argue that there are many mediocre ones that do the same.) And then there are great books brought out by small presses that, despite kicking all kinds of ass, manage to reach only a small number of readers.
Read Column →Writing the Crime Scene: Guns
September 8th, 2016
Your story opens with a female detective kicking in the front door of a drug dealer's house. She points her gun into the darkness of the entryway. Wait! What kind of a gun is it? Is it a Beretta 92FS pistol? Or is it a Mossberg 500 Tactical Tri-Rail Forend shotgun? How many times can she shoot before it needs to be reloaded? Will the muzzle flare light up the hallway when she fires?
Read Column →When Writers Do It Wrong: The Top 10 Ways To Annoy Your Twitter Followers
September 8th, 2016
Let’s talk about Twitter. If you’re a writer on Twitter, you’re probably trying to sell your books, promote your stories/poems, and/or share your blog, right? Maybe the instinctive number-hogging drive in humans has told you that the bigger the "followers" number, the better you’re doing. More equals better? More tweets. More retweets. More followers. More sales. More. More. MOAR!
Read Column →The DC Cinematic Universe: "Pregnant Moments" and Shallow Adaptations
September 7th, 2016
The DC Extended Universe started with 2013’s Man of Steel, but with the release of this year’s Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, it’s clear these are only loose adaptations of the comic book source material. That being said, are these iterations valid? Because the intriguing thing about this shared universe, the brain child of screenwriter David Goyer and directors Zack Snyder and David Ayer, is that it is true to its roots in an unexpected way.
Read Column →10 Super Weird Things About 'The Da Vinci Code'
September 7th, 2016
Let's start this off with an admission of guilt: I decided on this column because I thought 2016 was the ten-year anniversary of the release of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It turns out 2016 is the ten-year anniversary of the movie's release. The book came out in 2003.
Read Column →What Works & What Doesn't: 'Children of the Corn'
September 6th, 2016
Welcome back to What Works & What Doesn't, where we analyze screenplays based, literally, on what works and what doesn't work. This time around we'll be discussing the use of voice-over narration via the 1984 film Children of the Corn, based upon a short story of the same name by Stephen King (first published in 1977, and featured in his 1978 collection Night Shift).
Read Column →Why These 5 Books Are On So Many School Reading Lists
September 6th, 2016
Holes, Anne of Green Gables, Things Fall Apart, The Catcher In The Rye, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Animal Farm, most of Shakespeare's plays. These titles share a commonality in the sheer number of dog-eared copies that litter school desks and are jammed in lockers and backpacks.
Read Column →Why The F*ck Aren’t You Reading Lauren Beukes?
September 2nd, 2016
image via LaurenBeukes.com Why The F*ck Aren't You Reading? is a feature where the columnist spotlights a writer who has a dedicated following and is well known within the writing community, but hasn't achieved the elephant-in-the-room style success of a Stephen King or Gillian Flynn—But they deserve to, dammit! Hopefully the column will help gain the author featured a few more well deserved readers. My favorite writers are the ones who just don’t give a shit.
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