Columns

Don't Be Intimidated by Literary Journal Guidelines

January 15th, 2018

Image by dimitri_c One of the biggest steps for a writer is that moment when they decide to start submitting their work to literary journals. It's a moment in which the writer exposes their own vulnerabilities and opens themself up to rejection (and rejection will come, I promise you that). But there's also a subconscious minefield that writers need to navigate when submitting to journals.

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8 New Writing Challenges for 2018

January 15th, 2018

Image via Alison Scott Last year I hosted a writing group where participants challenged themselves to write one story per week for the entire year. This year we’re doing things a little differently. Taking a ‘choose your own adventure’ approach where there are a series of challenges for writers to opt into at the start of and throughout the year.

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10 Easy Ways to Improve Your First Chapter Right Now

January 12th, 2018

Header photo via Unsplash If you’re hoping that people will read your 300-page masterpiece, you’d better make sure the first ten pages are as close to perfect as you can get them. This article focuses on fixing ten common problems that plague the opening chapters of unpublished novels. Before you send that manuscript off to prospective agents and publishers, consider addressing the following issues to tighten up your first chapter.

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Looking Back: The 2017 One Story Per Week Writing Challenge

January 12th, 2018

Last year I wrote about the 2017 One Story Per Week Writing Challenge and hosted an online writing group and support network for participants. One year on and 2017 was a hell of a ride. Some participants managed to write 52 stories in 2017, whereas others (present company included) didn’t quite hit that gold standard. Still, we all learned so much about ourselves and our writing.

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So You Want To Write About The Cold

January 11th, 2018

Take It Easy On The Visuals It’s easy to fall back on visuals when you write. Colors, actions, how tall something is. When you work with cold, it’s a great time to try and create balance with some of the other senses. Especially because cold itself can’t be seen. Check it out:

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5 Tips on When and Where to Promote Your Book

January 10th, 2018

There is an entire cottage industry built around helping writers sell their work. ‘Your book is your hook.' ‘Marketing is everything.’ ‘You don’t get what you don’t ask for, so get people to buy your book.'

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In Defense of YA Twitter

January 10th, 2018

Listen, I’ve been a fan of social media since I signed up for my first Xanga (if you know it, you know it) site back in middle school. I’ve been singing the praises of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et. al for years, and refuse to so much as take one day off because, well, I kinda look down on people who take a hiatus for anything but intense personal or professional reason.

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10 Novels that Deserve a Remake

January 8th, 2018

I'm that guy throwing around expletives whenever the conversation turns to movie remakes. In a nutshell, I think 99% of them are unnecessary. However, Hollywood cares little for what I think and most fellow film fanatics eat them up, even when they know the final product is going to be pathetically awful—nothing more than a money machine that runs on nostalgia. In any case, since fighting against remakes is futile, I decided to ask for rewrites of existing novels. Yeah, if you can remake good movies, why not other narratives that have been around for a while, right?

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Kazuo Ishiguro: A Primer

January 4th, 2018

Drum-roll, please: in October, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to… none other than Kazuo Ishiguro, the esteemed British novelist and purveyor of hidden glances and repressed emotions. “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell,” Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told reporters when they announced their decision. “But you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix. Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.”

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'Ready Player One': Fun Ride or Commercialized Nostalgia?

January 3rd, 2018

You’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen the book, and you’ve seen the movie tie-in cover they insist on printing even though NOBODY WANTS IT. Is Ready Player One a reference-heavy, cynical, nostalgia vampire feeding off the good memories we have of other pieces of media? Or is it a good book? Or is it both? What the hell is it?

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