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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).
Read Column →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.
Read Column →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.
Read Column →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.
Read Column →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.
Read Column →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.”
Read Column →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.
Read Column →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?
Read Column →Teenage Wasteland: Please, No More Teenage Superheroes
August 25th, 2016
Look at this. The image above these words is the cover to Ms. Marvel #007. Selfies with Wolverine. Ridiculous. I'm old. I don't want to see teens anywhere, but there are two places I ESPECIALLY don't want to see them: on my lawn and in my comics. They're screwing up both. And it seems like there are so many teen heroes now. Kamala Khan, new Ms. Marvel, is in high school. Miles Morales, new Ultimate Spider-Man, was 13 when he started showing up in comics. Riri Williams, the new Iron Man, is 15.
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