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11 Ways Marvel Comics Can Change To Attract Consumers
July 31st, 2017
Marvel Comics sold a boatload of Black Panther #1's in April 2016, but comics sales had already begun flagging across the board.
Read Column →Striking Sparks: Where the Ideas Come From
July 28th, 2017
I’m always amazed and grateful when a new idea for a story comes to me, when the gods of chance deliver one of those What if? moments. Something that stirs the imagination. It’s like a spell. The fingers itch to write, to capture the vaguely seen shape ahead, the blurred figure, whatever it might be. My new novel, A Man of Shadows, was born in such a way, from a number of separate ideas that suddenly joined together. Alice in Wonderland style, a tiny door was opened, allowing a glimpse into a curious world. Where would that pathway take me?
Read Column →My Own Kind of Beautiful: How Geography Affects the Writing Process
July 27th, 2017
By Oregon's Mt. Hood Territory - Public Domain It’s most noticeable in Texan writers, the way the words are clipped and short, dry like hard dirt. LA breeds its own type of feeling. All the words mean something else, and they’re played for flash, hiding something, almost like double speak. NYC writing is busy and alive.
Read Column →How to Take Edits 101
July 27th, 2017
I have seen a lot of writing advice articles throughout the years. Some great, some terrible, but I can’t recall seeing anything on the unsexy topic of how to take edits. A lot of writers complain that editors/publishers want to ‘change’ (fix) their story, so fuck publishing, they’ll just put it out themselves. I’ve seen that a lot from very talented people and it got me thinking—do aspiring writers not know how editing works?
Read Column →Reflecting Early: 7 Memoirs by Young Authors
July 26th, 2017
There's a longtime debate about memoir. Can it only be produced after years of carefully accrued wisdom and self-reflection, or is it like any other genre of writing—dependent on the talents of the individual author? Give some of the titles below a read and decide for yourself.
Read Column →Out-of-Print Genre Books Are Expensive But Worth It
July 25th, 2017
Sometimes books go out of print. This can be for a number of reasons. Perhaps sales were low at the time. Perhaps the company that originally published the book has gone out of business. Perhaps the author, for his or her own reasons, pulled the book from the shelves.
Read Column →My Unlikely Writing Influences
July 25th, 2017
Like many writers, I was reared on a never-ending veneration for big guns such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Authors who’ve passed some ‘immortal’ litmus test for stuffy academic types to get overly excited about. Harsh? Perhaps, because most of the top tier lit club have deservedly earned their marks. But along the path I’ve learned some of the best prose originates from sources other than these writing titans.
Read Column →All in a Day: YA That Takes Place in 24 Hours
July 25th, 2017
We’ve all had those days that go on forever and then some, while others take place seemingly in the blink of an eye. But what can happen when an entire book’s worth of events occur in the span of 24 hours? A lot, apparently! These six Young Adult novels pack an enormous amount of action and drama, and a year’s worth of emotion in a mere day, and we dare you to put them down before binge reading in the same amount of time.
Read Column →On the Trail of a Murder: Helene Stapinski on Research and Memoir
July 24th, 2017
Helene Stapinksi grew up hearing about a murder. A family murder, no less, a story her mother passed down about her great-great-grandmother Vita in order to scare young Stapinski into life on the straight and narrow. Her family was based in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was one of “swindlers, bookies, embezzlers, and mobster-wannabes,” according to a page on her website, although her own mother managed to extricate herself from the crime life.
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