Columns

Upon My Death: What Happens To An Author's Unfinished Work?

November 8th, 2018

I have a birthday coming up, so of course that's got me thinking about my death. For me, and for a lot of writers, what I'll leave behind mostly amounts to a pile of papers and manuscripts and journals and stuff jotted on a Jimmy Johns wrapper that seemed very important at the time. Which is why I decided to look into my options. What can be done with my work after I die? What have some of my betters done?

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Daredevil Season 3: Reconstruction

November 6th, 2018

Superheroes are always reinventing themselves. Eventually, they all take on an enemy or challenge that is far beyond anything they have ever faced. They are defeated, or emerge barely victorious, at a very high cost. Our hero may have survived, but they are not the same—this harrowing ordeal has fundamentally changed them, and now they must rediscover what kind of hero he is going to be. It happened to Captain America after he was assassinated in the Civil War comics, and Thor went through a similar revival after Asgard was destroyed in Ragnarok.

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Exploring the Real Town Behind Silent Hill

November 5th, 2018

For over a decade, Centralia, Pennsylvania has been dubbed ‘the real-life Silent Hill’. And it’s easy to see why, with its history ripe for horror. Roads abruptly end, poisonous gases leak from cracks in the concrete, children are sucked into sinkholes, spouses murder each other. But the more I’ve researched Centralia, the more I’ve realised that, like all good horror stories, this one is more of a tragedy.

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No, You’re Freaking Out About Your New Book!

November 1st, 2018

Listen, writing is the greatest gig in the world. It really is. I wouldn’t change it for anything. Some of the best people I’ve met and the coolest places I’ve been to have entered my life because of books. That said, some parts of it are…well, there’s a reason why most authors are slightly insane. In my case, I write because I have stories to tell, things to say, messages to deliver, imaginary people to kill, magic to explore, and a vision of identity, Otherness, violence, crime, and syncretism I want to share with the world.

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Ranking 20 Literary Monsters

October 31st, 2018

Here, I present to you, a ranking of literary monsters. They’re ranked from worst to best. So if you want to find the best monsters, skip to the end. If you want to start with the worst, you’re in the right spot, and you’ll get to hear all about why the Jabberwock sucks.

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How a Community and a War Spawned a Collection

October 30th, 2018

2011… My first campaign as a novelist was a success, insofar as I had accumulated a lot of words and pages, generated characters and plots, and had a basic beginning and end. It was stuffed with all manner of crazy, carefully crafted ephemera as well: fake magazine and newspaper clippings, court reports, and handwritten letters that took me as long to create as the novel took to write. It was a tome about false identity and missing lovers and the narcotic draw of Hollywood.

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Engage Your Readers By Putting Them To Work

October 29th, 2018

We all know that writers put a lot of work into their stories, but we don’t often enough consider the work readers put into reading them. This might be because few of us think of reading, especially reading fiction, as work, but rather as a pleasure, an escape, an inspiration. It is work, though, even if it’s not work we think too much about. And without that work, reading wouldn’t be nearly so rewarding. As writers, then, we want to ask our readers to do the right kind of work, the kind that helps them engage with our stories as much as possible.

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Book vs. Films: "The Haunting Of Hill House"

October 26th, 2018

In 2019, Shirley Jackson's seminal The Haunting of Hill House will celebrate its 60th birthday.

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Fatter than Flash, Shorter than Short: The Joys of the Brief Story

October 26th, 2018

In the spring of 2015, I taught a graduate course called The Craft of Fiction. It was the first time our department had offered this course, and I approached it as a study in forms of storytelling. Every week I assigned the reading of fiction that I had arranged under loose headings:

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Dead Batteries and Killer Apps: Technology in Horror

October 25th, 2018

KillerCon was held in Austin at the end of August. It was a superb conference and hardcore horror legend Wrath James White did a fantastic job. I had a blast that weekend. I did a reading, was on a few panels, and got to hang out with some of my favorite people.

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