Columns

I'm Tired of Genre Fiction. Gimme the Weird Stuff.

August 24th, 2017

Header image: Begotten A few years ago I read and reviewed Blake Butler’s 300,000,000 for Electric Literature. I couldn’t get my head around it. At times during my reading I felt lost, weirded-out, even physically ill. My review speaks to this confusion, like someone walking out of a haunted house that’s actually haunted. It thrilled me, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

8 Tips to Help You Kick Ass in Online Fights

August 23rd, 2017

You've been there. A friend of yours posts that she's about to watch a movie. You "like" the post and drop your two cents. Three seconds later, some random person calls you a fucking idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. If that doesn't happen, then maybe you tell someone who posted about Black Lives Matter being the true root of all racial unrest in the country that maybe the douchenozzles with the Nazi flags are to blame.

Three Things Nobody Told Me About Having a Children’s Book Published

August 23rd, 2017

My publisher was concerned about gorillas taking their clothes off, possibly for money, I think. Stripping gorillas must be a big problem in some parts of the country, because this seemed like a deal-breaker. My first children’s book was originally called Gorillas A-Go-Go, but that title wasn’t going to fly. The A-Go-Go part implies stripping, someone said.

This Can't Be: Realism and Genre vs. Reality

August 22nd, 2017

In his seminal story “The Nose,” Nikolai Gogol posits “[s]trange events happen in this world, events which are sometimes entirely improbable.” If you’ve never read “The Nose,” it’s about an official from St. Petersburg whose nose is cut off and goes on to live a life of its own. It converses. It walks around. It rises in social rank to a station higher than that of its owner. It’s not a realistic story. This is the kind of work that we need now.

Storyville: Eight New, Mashed Up Sub-Genres

August 21st, 2017

So, what are some new kinds of stories you can write—strange hybrids that might stand out from the pack when sending your work out? Let’s take a look.

Woodshedding for Writers

August 21st, 2017

Header: lil artsy via Pexels Woodshedding comes up all the time in interviews with guitar players. Doesn’t matter if it’s Brian Wilson or Mastodon’s Brent Hinds, most every guitar player will talk about this concept. What is it?

How a Close Reading of 'Catch-22' Recreates the College Classroom

August 17th, 2017

When one of us professional English majors finally escape from university life, we do tend to get nostalgic for how books are read when they’re assigned. It’s not always easy to engage with a text on your own, especially when it’s an older book or one that’s a challenge. Once you’ve re-read the Harry Potter series for the umpteenth time, you might think your brain could use a little flexing. So you sit down with James Joyce’s Ulysses and realize it’s nearly impenetrable.

Avoiding Stereotypes When Writing Place (Even If That Place Is Home)

August 16th, 2017

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of the Shitty First Draft

August 15th, 2017

Right now, I’m revising a shitty first draft of a short novel. It’s a pain because I pretty much have to rewrite the whole thing, but what's great is I don’t have to think too much about the plot. I’m switching the POV from third person past tense to first person present tense. I’m focusing more on the language this time around, because I know my story and my characters. I am experiencing the best and worst parts of writing a shitty first draft.

Should Stephen King's "Rage" Return to Print?

August 14th, 2017

In Stephen King’s Rage, a high school student with a gun shoots his algebra teacher and takes a class of high schoolers hostage. King wrote the book when he himself was in high school. He let it sit, and after he’d published half a dozen bestsellers, he rewrote Rage and had it published in paperback under the Richard Bachman pseudonym. The book sold decently, and then it pretty much went away, as most books do. Then: