Columns

10 Literary Holidays We Desperately Need

March 26th, 2018

Take a look at the calendar. Come up with your top three complaints about it.  Here are mine:

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Flannery O'Connor's Greatest Hits

March 23rd, 2018

Image via Georgia Humanities Flannery O’Connor is one of those names you hear a lot, but folks who aren’t interested in writing and short stories don’t know a lot about her.

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3 Things Critique Groups Are Great For (and 3 Things They Really Aren't)

March 23rd, 2018

Whether you’re new to writing or a seasoned pro, a good critique group is, if not a necessity, a pretty damned good idea. How else are you going to get out of your own head—and out of your own way—so you can see your work the way a reader will? And how else are you going to get your work in shape to submit?

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5 Reasons to Study Creative Writing in School

March 22nd, 2018

There’s no One True Way to be a writer. Instead, everybody has their own path to success, their own process, their own stories to tell. Some writers write every day at 4 a.m. with a cup of coffee and the mighty roar of a powerful grizzly bear. Good on them. Others write for a full day in a frenzy of inspiration and activity, lay back and slip into a catatonic state for weeks, and repeat. And there’s so many in between.

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Writing: All It Takes Is Guts

March 22nd, 2018

4 years ago I was sweating bullets, sitting in the bright sunlight of Cross Plains, Texas during Barbarian Days. Now let me answer your first two questions: One: Cross Plains is a small, oilfield town that the Texas highways left behind a long time ago.

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Seven Badass Female Characters Written by Women

March 21st, 2018

At Glamour Magazine’s 25th annual Women of the Year Awards, recipient of the Hollywood Hero award, Reese Witherspoon, said, “I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation — because inevitably, the girl turns to the guy and says, ‘What do we do now?’” While she declared exasperation at this line, she urged women to turn the question back on themselves and to ponder, “What can we do to encourage the creation of more empowered female characters?”

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5 Promotion Tips for Small Press and Self Published Authors

March 19th, 2018

Unflattering picture of author provided by author In 2015 I wrote a parody novel called Kanye West—Reanimator. It reimagined H.P. Lovecraft's story "Herbert West—Reanimator" with—you guessed it—Kanye West as the titular character. Yolo House, a kinda-sorta offshoot of Lazy Fascist Press created specifically for the book's release, published it.

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Library Love: Old Books Make Me Feel Fancy!

March 19th, 2018

Guys, you would not believe what I discovered when I was mindlessly browsing the stacks at my university library: Really. Old. Books. Not science textbooks from the 1950's old. Not even first edition The Great Gatsby old. I'm talking about books about Hawaii when Hawaii was still called the Sandwich Islands. Did you even know that? I did, but I'm pretty sure I learned that from 1980's cartoons. Anyway, it was like looking at the history of history.

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10 Female Authors Who Changed My Life

March 16th, 2018

When we say someone or something changed our life, we generally speak of things or people who had a lasting impact on the way we see or do things. However, there are many small changes that regularly come from encountering situations, objects, and individuals. Throughout my life, I've encountered the work/personality/career/ideas/hustle of many women, and some of the them changed my outlook, inspired me, or changed/expanded/enriched the way I look at words. Here are ten of many.

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The "When" Guide for Writers: Master the Science of Perfect Timing (Part 2)

March 14th, 2018

Part one of this article on creative timing gives you context; my vision for this next part is to give you actionable tactics. My first mission was to reach out to Dan Pink himself, the formidable author of When and many other excellent books, such as Drive and To Sell is Human. His inbox is notoriously difficult to penetrate, so I kept it short and asked him:

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