Columns

Primer: The Work of Tom Piccirilli

November 18th, 2015

Tom Piccirilli passed away this July and the literary world lost one of its most intense and passionate authors. Like many of his friends and acquaintances wrote in their tributes earlier this year, Tom was a great, talented guy. He was always down to talk writing and publishing with people he barely knew (like me!). I have an email lingering in my account from him, which still sits there to this day. I asked to interview him back in 2009, but the magazine I was working with at the time shut down unexpectedly, so the interview never happened. I never got back to him about it.

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Library Love: A Rough Timeline of Lost Libraries

November 17th, 2015

Not everyone loves books. For centuries, despotic governments and rulers have feared the power of the written word and its influence on the masses; enough to destroy the most hallowed sanctuaries of bibliophiles across the globe—libraries. From Iraq to Los Angeles, countless libraries have been lost to war, fire, and “progress.” 

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'Scream: The TV Series' – Exploring Character Archetypes and Story Conventions in Slashers

November 16th, 2015

When I first heard about Scream: The TV Series, like many others, I was skeptical. Let’s face it, movie to television adaptations are pretty hit and miss, the original Scream is an iconic part of horror history, and the traditional slasher isn’t meant to stretch much further than ninety minutes. Now, with the final credits a mere memory, I have mixed feelings about Scream: The TV Series.

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5 Easy Ways to Make Your Writing Gender-Neutral

November 13th, 2015

You know, I had another introduction planned, but as I have been writing this over the last month, many articles on the topic of gender-neutral language have popped up (you’ll see me mention some of them below). This topic is on everyone’s mind lately because we have some high-profile people who have brought it to the forefront. But let’s not be naïve. This didn’t start the day Caitlyn appeared on Vanity Fair. This is a conversation a lot of people have been having for a long time.

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10 Albums Based on Books and Literature

November 13th, 2015

Music fans are no doubt familiar with "concept albums," recordings by a given artist that offer a thematically-unified narrative told through lyrics and musical movements. For obvious reasons, these albums, which differ from more standard releases that simply collect unrelated songs, are often compared to novels. Sometimes, musicians take this literary connection quite literally, creating records that are conceptually hinged around books and literature, sometimes to great effect, other times, not so much.

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Rejection Letters Deciphered: 5 Common Reasons Agents Give for Rejecting Novels (And What They Really Mean)

November 12th, 2015

By the time you submitted your novel to literary agents, you'd put it through a whole lot of revisions. You'd run it by trusted critique partners. And your query was good enough to get you the coveted partial-manuscript request—or the even more coveted full-manuscript request. So what's up with these rejection letters? Like nearly everything associated with publishing, much of this is simply a numbers game—agents receive a huge number of queries every year, and they can only accept so many clients.

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5 Uses For Your Unfinished NaNoWriMo Manuscript

November 11th, 2015

It was mid-October when I realized I wasn't going to complete NaNoWriMo this year. I looked at my work calendar for the next month, did some quick word count calculations, and knew the jig was up before it began. At the moment, I'm a sad 2,000 words deep and falling further behind every day. 

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Why You're Going To Love AMC's 'Preacher'

November 10th, 2015

You've got a few months to catch up on Preacher's run of comics from the mid-90's before the series premiere on AMC. Or you could just read this column. Let's take a look. And I promise, no spoilers that wouldn't be found in the show's trailer, that trailer's description, or in the description for the first volume of comics. This is a really great series, and part of what makes it great is the surprise. I swear, I'll do my best to preserve the element of surprise here.

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The Word Is Mightier Than ‘the Pen’: 5 Imprisoned Writers

November 9th, 2015

What with the release of the film Trumbo on November 6 and the upcoming Day of the Imprisoned Writer on November 15, it's the season of persecution as far as writers are concerned. I'm not talking about self-persecution — the nasty little voices inside us who remind us that we're essentially worthless, talentless hacks. No, I'm referring to the jackboot kind of persecution — the type that involves shackles and handcuffs, judges' gavels pounding and cell doors clanking shut. The hopeless type.

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5 Storytelling Lessons You Can Learn From James Bond

November 6th, 2015

This week sees the release of Spectre, the latest James Bond film. Bond films have really run the gamut from the release of Dr. No in 1962, switching actors and styles as the times demanded. Some of them (A View to a Kill, for example) are awful, but there are lessons, real storytelling lessons, to be learned from the Bond films, particularly the most recent ones. Whether or not Spectre lives up to them remains to be seen.

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