Columns

7 Reasons Authors Need to be More Like Rappers

February 13th, 2017

I once wrote a piece about how most of the readings I've been to have bored me to tears. You can probably guess what happened next: half of the people who read it vociferously agreed and the other half felt like I was messing with them and the monotone voice they developed while learning to read in public. The idea of better performances and larger personalities in the literary community is one that has been in my head for a while.

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5 Lit-Friendly Cities You Can Expatriate To

February 13th, 2017

Are you serious about expatriating to another country, given America's current political climate? Want to go to a place that will embrace your writerly tendencies? At the very least, do you want to know about some nerdy writer things to check out while you're abroad? These five foreign cities have what you're looking for.

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Vampire Love is the Best Kind

February 10th, 2017

My guilty pleasure is vampire fiction. It is mine and mine alone, alongside the millions of other women who share the same exact guilty pleasure. Vampire drama takes the mundane and makes it art. It takes normal human interactions and adds spice where none existed. It is high school and you get to be the popular girl... forever. And vampire love is truly the best kind — intense, dramatic, enduring. But not all vampire stories are created equal. Let's have a look at three vampire worlds that started as books and then transitioned to the screen in a major way.

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Write Exciting Stories About Boring Things

February 10th, 2017

I’m sitting in the $2 theater watching Arrival. My mouth is full of sub sandwich because, like I said, this is the $2 theater, where bringing in a sub is overlooked because it’s better than bringing in beers. Multiple. My seat sucks because we got there just before the movie started, and Arrival is not a movie that’s meant to be viewed at a 45-degree angle. Most movies aren’t, I’m learning.

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5 Tips for Writing Short Stories That Sell

February 9th, 2017

Look at that title, huh? That's a tall order. I don't have a silver bullet that will lead you to sell every short story you've written. If I did, like most self-help gurus, I'd be taking my own advice and writing those stories myself, to add to my meager fifteen-or-so short story sales.

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Storyville: How to Put Weather in Your Fiction (Without Being Dull and Boring)

February 9th, 2017

While it might be cliché to start off a story or novel with weather, it’s still very important when building your world to include the elements—not just setting, as in architecture, and the people in your story, but the day and night, season, and current conditions. It can help to not only ground your story, but provide additional character, atmosphere, and mood. So, how can we do that exactly? Let’s chat.

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Three Secrets to a Cleaner First Draft

February 8th, 2017

Every writer knows that writing is re-writing and that the real magic of a novel happens in revisions, but if you’re anything like me, those revisions can be a really daunting task. If you’ve ever found your first drafts to be really, truly a mess, you know how difficult it can be to jump in and edit. And the messier the first draft, the longer and more complicated those edits can be.

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9 Facebook Posts by Authors We Don't Need to See in 2017

February 6th, 2017

Social media is a weird place nowadays. Between cats, politics, uneducated opinions, and selfies, Facebook is a strange land where anything and everything can happen. Unfortunately, not all of it is good. Actually, scratch that: most of it is bad. Yes, there are scientific breakthroughs, superb films, interesting discussions, hilarious memes, and fun, enlightening articles to be found on Facebook, but when it comes to authors, they sometimes tend to do a series of things that annoy the hell out of regular people and fellow authors alike.

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Time Out: Don't Write Time Travel (Unless You Do It Right)

February 3rd, 2017

Time travel. It’s such a popular, big idea. Everyone wants to put their stamp on time travel, take their swing at it. See how I used two metaphors there, one for jocks who like baseball and one for nerds who like stamp collecting? While I appreciate the excitement and enthusiasm for time travel tales, I think we could take a break, rethink some of what time travel really is, and then come back with better, more interesting stories. What do I mean?

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A Writer's 5 Stages of Computer Failure

February 2nd, 2017

Last month, my MacBook died. I was in the process of editing a manuscript when my mouse cursor transformed into the spinning wheel of death. I feel like this mechanism is misleading, because every time I see the spinning wheel of death I initially feel hopeful that I might get a chance to play Wheel of Fortune, but of course there’s never any Wheel of Fortune. There’s nothing fortunate about the spinning wheel of death, except for its very metal name. I waited a good half hour, but it never resolved itself, so I powered the machine off manually and rebooted it.

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