Columns

How To Tell Your Family and Friends You're A Writer

November 24th, 2014

Let me tell you about a life thing that I didn't handle very well. I had a girlfriend. And a new writing habit. Writing's a good new habit to have, and my girlfriend was a good girlfriend to have. I know, so far none of this sounds like a problem.

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The Books Stephen King Hasn’t Written Yet, But Should

November 21st, 2014

Author photo by Shane Leonard via stephenking.com - Typewriter image by Caryn Morgan Stephen King has his faults as a writer—this is the man who gave the world a book where people literally shit aliens—but the one accusation you can't lay at his door is that he doesn't write enough.

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The Accuracy of Edward Bellamy: Predicting the Future with Science Fiction

November 21st, 2014

There's a fascinating little book you've probably never heard of called Looking Backward: 2000-1887, but a little over a hundred years ago it was wildly popular. In fact, at the time, it was the third best-selling novel, and it did something few other works of fiction dared to do: it predicted the future.

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Narrative Failure: The Most Common Error Message in Video Games

November 20th, 2014

There was a time when a video game didn't need a story longer than a sentence. Shoot the space rocks. Save the princess. Kill the monsters. Beat the other player. Some games didn't even bother with the pretense of narrative. The original Mario Bros. arcade cabinet was just a gladiatorial arena where two brothers fought to the death in a menagerie of exotic monsters to win coins and the adulation of the players. In those early halcyon days, it didn't really matter.

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Prose & Conversation: "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris

November 20th, 2014

The Girl Next Door. Tampa. Something Wicked This Way Comes. These are just a few of the dark, heady texts Richard Thomas and I have discussed here on our semi-monthly column, Prose & Cons.

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Culling The Classics: "The Awakening"

November 19th, 2014

Last month I sent out a call on Twitter for November "Culling The Classics" suggestions to get a feel for what the public was dying to see culled, what classic works of literature people were really curious about but didn't want to invest in without a bit of confirmation that the read wouldn't be a waste of time. I got one reply. Thanks for voting, Shantel.

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Lessons From My Grandmother

November 19th, 2014

Two things brought me true joy as a child: dressing up like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and spending the day at my Grandmother's (coincidentally, also named Dorothy). I lived in a ranch style house, so I was mystified by her house's basement and entire second floor. It was so much space for one person! All three floors were piled high with beautiful furniture, clothes, and antiques, which I considered to be fancy toys at the age of five.

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Product Review: Longform

November 18th, 2014

We live in a truly amazing technological era. I've already forgotten about the time before, when you couldn't literally ask Google a question and get an answer in seconds. Unfortunately, information comes fairly cheap these days, and you have to take anything you read online with a grain of salt. You could be reading an article about the benefits of a high salt diet, for instance, only to discover it wasn't an article at all, but a paid advertisement by Big Salt PR men, made to look like an unbiased piece of journalism. 

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Death by Canonization: Against Literary Criticism's Mortal Sin

November 17th, 2014

Okay, boys and girls. Today, I want to rant to you about one of my greatest frustrations in the study of literature. While I've discussed this issue using different terminology in the past (hero worship, justification bias, etc.), today I'm going to borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace: death by canonization.

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Read and Repeat: Finding the Perfect Comfort Book

November 17th, 2014

  Grab the hot chocolate and a fleece blanket. November is an ideal month for curling up inside with a book, but most people don't lunge for the Chicago Manual of Style when they've had a long day. Comfort is often defined as a sense of being at ease, or the opposite of stress. Daniel Miller describes the sensation in The Comfort of Things as being attained through the presence of familiar objects.

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