Columns

Legends of Tomorrow: An Epic Disappointment

March 24th, 2016

I really wanted to like this show. Gave it a sincere effort. On paper, the pitch is great: a bunch of secondary characters (heroes and villains) from DC’s popular series Arrow and The Flash get recruited by a time traveler to fight an immortal warlord named Vandal Savage throughout history. The stuff of Saturday morning cartoons rendered flesh on a primetime action adventure show. Who wouldn’t want to watch that?

Read Column →

Four Famous Writers Whose Prose Was Crap

March 22nd, 2016

I'm going to let you in on a secret here. It's kind of technical, so you need to concentrate. Here goes. Writing well consists of two elements: 1) Big picture stuff (the story) 2) Small picture stuff (the words you use to tell the story) Now I'm going to let you in on another well-guarded secret. You might want to sit down before reading it, because this is radical. The only one of these two that matters, is the first one. 

Read Column →

5 Original Superhero Creations in Prose Form

March 22nd, 2016

While superheroes are incredibly popular both in comic books (the media format they were born in) and on the film screen, there is a small but steadily growing output of superhero fiction in novel and short story form. 

Read Column →

16 Books About Madness

March 21st, 2016

Every March, a solid chunk of the US population goes a little mad, as Norman Bates put it. Except it's not at all like the madness he was talking about, but rather a fever pitch over a seemingly never-ending barrage of college basketball games and bracket-based gambling that culminates in a championship game at the end of the month.

Read Column →

5 Movies That Influenced Quentin Tarantino’s 'Reservoir Dogs'

March 21st, 2016

Over two decades since its original release, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is rightly hailed as a cult classic. So much so that Empire magazine named it the ‘Greatest Independent Film of all Time’. As with all of Tarantino’s work there were a great number of films and books that influenced Reservoir Dogs. Let’s explore a few of them.  Great artists steal; they don’t do homages. –Quentin Tarantino

Read Column →

Five (Dirty Little) Truths about Proofreading

March 18th, 2016

By the time your book reaches the final stage of editing, you've read each sentence what feels like a million times. And yet, insidious errors lurk within the pages of this perfect manuscript that you, the author, simply cannot see. That's where proofreaders (also known as copyeditors) come in. A good copyeditor is not just someone who has mastered every comma rule in the English language (no small feat); a good copyeditor is someone who will find errors that twenty beta readers manage to miss but anyone who paid actual money for your book, somehow, will not.

Read Column →

Kevin Smith vs. Mark Waid: The End of an Era for Daredevil

March 17th, 2016

1998 was a very weird time for Marvel Comics. They had gone bankrupt two years before, X-Men and the superhero movie renaissance were two years away, and Daredevil had just been canceled. So when writer/director Kevin Smith came onboard to write a new volume that would also launch the Marvel Knights imprint, it seemed a boon from the gods.

Read Column →

7 Tips on How To Write a Better Open Letter

March 16th, 2016

Based on the last couple months, looks like we're in for a long year of open letters. And I can't take it anymore. Look, I get it. You spilled takeout on your expensive jeans. Your least-favorite football player did something that pissed you off. Or maybe you have a kid who has a disease and you want to tell everyone about some jerk who made fun of her. Or maybe, shooting in the dark here, there's a political candidate you have opinions about. 

Read Column →

Five Great Folk Horror Novels

March 11th, 2016

Folk horror isn’t really a fiction genre per se. It usually refers to a certain kind of British horror movie that came out in the 70s, films like Wicker Man, Blood on Satan's Claw, and perhaps Witchfinder General, among others. 

Read Column →

Storyville: The DOs and DONTs of Running a Successful Kickstarter Campaign

March 10th, 2016

So you’ve probably heard about the Kickstarter I ran this past February, raising over $55,000 to launch a new online magazine of neo-noir, speculative fiction with a literary bent—Gamut. Here are some of the lessons I learned during this rollercoaster of a month. DO care about what you’re doing. It has to matter to you. A lot.

Read Column →