Columns

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.

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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A Head Full of Tropes: Finding New Life in Dead Ideas

July 24th, 2017

Image via General Mills Vampires, zombies, Satan and werewolves. These are a few of my favorite tropes.

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Why Do So Many Indie Presses Fail?

July 21st, 2017

I've been aware of indie presses shutting down for a long time, but really started paying attention to it in the last three years. Besides being an indie author myself, I have many friends whose outstanding work is published by indie presses and a few friends who are publishers. Every time an indie press shuts down, authors are left scrambling to find new homes for their books, artists lose work opportunities, editors have one less available gig, and readers are left with less options.

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99 Cents Is Too Cheap For Your Book

July 21st, 2017

It’s been a little while since I tried the persuasive essay, the sort of thing we did in school, but I’m giving it a shot here. My recollection is that you’re supposed to outline your premise, go through all the points, then remind everyone what the premise was one last time. Y’know, for the morons. Or the teachers, who almost certainly would have to be drunk to grade 30 essays on whether or not it’s acceptable to wear hats in school.

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