Columns

Bearskin: A Fast Read 20 Years in the Making

June 12th, 2018

When I was twenty-eight years old, I quit a perfectly good job as an associate at a law firm to "become a writer.” Kind of early for a mid-life crisis, but a writer is what I’d always wanted to be, and life was passing by so quickly. I was nearly thirty years old, for god’s sake. I drove around out west for a couple of months, then returned to Virginia, took a part-time legal job, and started applying to graduate writing programs.

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6 Female Sci-fi Writers You Should Read

June 11th, 2018

On June 22nd, 1947, Octavia Butler (a pioneer of modern science fiction written by women) was born. 129 years before that, Mary Shelley published the novel Frankenstein, which some — such as author Brian Aldiss — argue was sci-fi’s first novel, and helped define the boundary-shattering genre. Butler and Shelley are just two of the many female writers who have helped shape sci-fi into the diverse fan-favorite it is today.

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The 8 Keys To A Good Heist Story

June 8th, 2018

This week Ocean’s 8 brings us the first all-female heist film! ...if we ignore 1996’s Set It Off, which is a pretty good heist movie. It’s maybe less a romp than some others, but if we’re talking firsts, let’s put all the cards on the table. Regardless, with the opening of Ocean’s 8, I got to thinking about what makes for a good heist story. What are the needed elements? Which 8 things should you make sure to have? And how can you use those elements to write something original?

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9 Things I Learned From Reading 45 Books At Once

June 4th, 2018

I have no idea what a normal reader is, or even if such a thing exists. My guess is a normal reader is someone who grabs a book and reads it until the last page has been turned. Then, that person grabs another one and repeats the process. I've never done that. Even in my ealry teens, I always had at least three books going—usually a novel, a poetry book, and a short story collection, but many times it was three novels at once.

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How 'Krypton' Keeps Things Interesting

May 31st, 2018

DC Comics loves origin stories. Just about every superhero in their stable has had their beginnings retold at least twice. On television, DC continues to produce prequel series that explore the early development of some of its most iconic characters. From Smallville to Gotham, they’ve done it so many times now that it’s become a formula.

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Storyville: Creating Tension in Your Fiction

May 30th, 2018

Think of any short story or novel that you’ve ever read and I can pretty much guarantee there is tension involved—and that it builds. Even the most innocent of nursery rhymes and fairy tales have tension.

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Project Redlight: Part 2

May 24th, 2018

You can read part 1 HERE “It’s probably your fault.” –Good Ass Kicking

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4 Mary Shelley Facts You Might Not Have Known

May 23rd, 2018

This month sees the arrival of a new biopic about Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and wife to one of Britain’s most celebrated poets. To mark its release, we’re looking at some of our favorite facts surrounding the life and work of this groundbreaking writer.

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Project Redlight: Part I

May 22nd, 2018

For anger slays the foolish man and jealousy kills the simple. -Gob 5:20 p.m. Something like twenty years ago I was stranded for what seemed like days in a hospital waiting room while my brother got a Total Recall-esque benign mass/government tracking device removed from his nasal cavity, and to kill time my dad and I started pondering the idea of writing our first screenplay. This was his initial brain tempest:

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Make Your Characters More Interesting With Lies

May 21st, 2018

When’s the last time one of your characters told a lie? A small one or a big one, doesn’t matter. Lies are an under-used facet of real-life interaction that don’t get enough play in fiction. Characters telling too much truth too much of the time makes for some very boring, very rote storytelling. Simple lies, elaborate lies, systematic lies, Santa Claus lies—all ways to push a story and a character into a new, more interesting, more real place.

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