Columns

The DC Cinematic Universe: "Pregnant Moments" and Shallow Adaptations

September 7th, 2016

The DC Extended Universe started with 2013’s Man of Steel, but with the release of this year’s Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, it’s clear these are only loose adaptations of the comic book source material. That being said, are these iterations valid? Because the intriguing thing about this shared universe, the brain child of screenwriter David Goyer and directors Zack Snyder and David Ayer, is that it is true to its roots in an unexpected way.

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10 Super Weird Things About 'The Da Vinci Code'

September 7th, 2016

Let's start this off with an admission of guilt: I decided on this column because I thought 2016 was the ten-year anniversary of the release of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.  It turns out 2016 is the ten-year anniversary of the movie's release. The book came out in 2003.

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What Works & What Doesn't: 'Children of the Corn'

September 6th, 2016

Welcome back to What Works & What Doesn't, where we analyze screenplays based, literally, on what works and what doesn't work. This time around we'll be discussing the use of voice-over narration via the 1984 film Children of the Corn, based upon a short story of the same name by Stephen King (first published in 1977, and featured in his 1978 collection Night Shift). 

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Why These 5 Books Are On So Many School Reading Lists

September 6th, 2016

Holes, Anne of Green Gables, Things Fall Apart, The Catcher In The Rye, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Animal Farm, most of Shakespeare's plays. These titles share a commonality in the sheer number of dog-eared copies that litter school desks and are jammed in lockers and backpacks.

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Why The F*ck Aren’t You Reading Lauren Beukes?

September 2nd, 2016

image via LaurenBeukes.com Why The F*ck Aren't You Reading? is a feature where the columnist spotlights a writer who has a dedicated following and is well known within the writing community, but hasn't achieved the elephant-in-the-room style success of a Stephen King or Gillian Flynn—But they deserve to, dammit! Hopefully the column will help gain the author featured a few more well deserved readers. My favorite writers are the ones who just don’t give a shit.

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Hoax! 4 Truly (or Falsely) Great Literary Frauds

September 1st, 2016

As forgeries go, literary fraud seems fairly harmless. Novelists are already liars; they make things up and pretend they’re true. And the extent to which we believe their lies determines the novel’s success. If nobody thinks the lies are even plausible, the novel usually fails. Crafting an intricate lie is the novelist’s goal, and we praise them when they get away with it.

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6 Ways Non-Writerly Spouses Help Improve Your Craft

August 31st, 2016

I have had relationships with many writers. An underlying commonality of these was the ripping apart of each others’ work. Nothing was ever sacred; there was never a project too close to my heart. And no wonder: We as writers must take a critical eye to each others’ stories, and that can complicate a writer-on-writer relationship.

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The Substance of Magic in Fiction

August 31st, 2016

What is magic? A working general definition goes something like this: “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.”

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My Favorite Reads Of 2016 So Far

August 30th, 2016

As all of you know, the publishing industry never stops. Big, small, and macro presses are constantly churning out new books week-after-week for public consumption. And week-after-week, publishers send out hundreds, sometimes thousands of books to clowns like me in hopes that we’ll feature one or ten of them in a review. As a reviewer, the sheer mass of books I’m sent is staggering. On average I receive anywhere between two and fifteen books a week, and as much as I would love to review all of them, I kind of like doing other things like sleeping and eating.

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Swipe left: Seven Sick Literary Hook-ups

August 26th, 2016

I met my husband at a bar. He was wearing his ex-girlfriend’s tweed jacket, and I asked him to dance. Two kids and a mortgage later, we’re still dancing, but that’s not always the way it works. Even with dating apps, it’s tough to find a match in the real world, unlike in fiction, where the characters have us, right? Like real life, only better. Or is it?

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