Columns

Ten Obsessions that Murder Writing Careers

November 8th, 2016

Writing is an obsession. It occupies your brain all the time. Your characters talk to you at night. Plot twists come to you in the middle of conversations with other human beings. The perfect day is spent inside putting words to paper regardless of the weather outside. Such is the life of the writer. Unfortunately, the same obsessive nature that allows writers to live and breathe their art is the same behavior that makes them easily develop hurtful practices that may hinder their career and cut into their writing time. Here are ten of those bad obsessions.

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Google Made Me Stupid. How Do I Learn to Read Again?

November 7th, 2016

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer I can’t read anymore.

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World Fantasy Convention 2016: Delayed Live Blog

November 7th, 2016

Thursday October 27 4:30 AM. My cousin drives me to San Jose airport from Gilroy, CA, to make my 6:20 flight to Columbus, OH. Howard Stern is on the radio and Lady Gaga plays "A Million Reasons" live in the studio. I start to cry in the dark truck, and I cling to my cousin on the curb, gripped by separation anxiety. Seriously. WFC? What was I thinking?

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What I'm Doing Instead of NaNoWriMo

November 1st, 2016

I've always been a big supporter of NaNoWriMo. I think it's a worthwhile endeavor that can teach writers a lot about style and habits. Over the years, I've participated to mixed success. Fast forward to today, however, and writing has become the way I pay the bills as a freelance columnist and newspaper stringer. I honestly don't have the time or desire to pump out 50,000 words for fun or practice, especially since it would draw energy away from the commercial writing that I rely on.

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Storyville: 10 Lesser-Known Stephen King Books Worth Reading

October 28th, 2016

Over the years, I’ve read just about all of Stephen King’s books—novels, novellas, collections, comics—you name it. Here is my list of ten of his lesser-known titles that I think are worth reading. Enjoy!

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The Horror Fiction Atlas: 7 Spooky Books with Settings You Can Actually Visit

October 28th, 2016

As a New Englander, I'm a lucky horror fan. In a day, I can visit the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King's home in Bangor, and a number of sites that directly inspired H.P. Lovecraft. But there are exciting stops for the more macabre among us all over the country. Here are just a few of them:

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Witness Protection, Barbecue, and Crushing Loneliness: Highlights from the 'South Village' Book Tour

October 27th, 2016

Last time I went on tour—for my second novel, City of Rose—I wrote dispatches from the road. You can find them here. For my third book, I decided to sum everything up at once, because it would be a great way to kill time on the flight home. I am tired of sitting on airplanes. This time around I made four stops. A jaunt up to Boston before a swing through the American Southwest. It seemed to go well, in that I did not get beaten up by a frat guy or stung by a scorpion.

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Community SPOOKlight: October 2016

October 27th, 2016

There's a rental house I see every day when I walk out to my car. It's a normal house, fits into the neighborhood, nothing special. Right now, for Halloween, the front yard of that house is full of fake webs, witches, ghouls, all the spooky stuff a Walgreens can provide. And there's something genuinely eerie about it. It's not the flying skeleton wrapped in a burlap cloak, holding its bony hands up over its head in that classic ghost pose. It's not the giant spiders that, in the evening, look even bigger somehow.

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What To Do When Your Book Jumps the Shark

October 26th, 2016

Oh, Happy Days. How I loved you when I was young. But remember that time you felt like you needed to jazz things up, improve your ratings with a wild and crazy stunt? So you had the Fonz don his leather jacket and too-short swim trunks, water skis and a life-preserver belt? And you made him - quite literally - jump over a bit of ocean in which a white shark - reminiscent of Jaws, released two years before - circled round and round and round. Menacing. Threatening.

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Tech and Product Round-up: October Edition

October 26th, 2016

image via Amazon Japan Hey folks, welcome back to another edition of LitReactor's monthly tech news round-up, whereby I'll talk about a few things in the technology world of special interest to writers. We've got stories about Google's less A.I. A.I.

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