Columns

The Butler Did It: Why We Always Blame the Servants

August 19th, 2015

When someone insinuates that “the butler did it” in a crime fiction novel, it’s a way of pointing out the most obvious suspect. But why is that? Upon further analysis, the guilty butler trope appears to damn servants by their employment status alone. After all, they know everything about the victim’s daily routine, and they’re always suspiciously nearby.

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The Age of the Unoriginal Idea

August 18th, 2015

It happens to the best of us: we spend painstaking hours typing away at a keyboard, finishing a first draft drenched in our blood, sweat, and tears; then, with trembling hands, we pass the story onto the first of our beta readers. All is going well—they gasp at all the right moments, laugh accordingly, cry when necessary—until they pause halfway down a page, look you dead in the eyes, and say those dreaded words: “This reminds me a lot of [INSERT RANDOM BESTSELLER HERE].”

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5 Strategies for Enriching Your Character Arcs

August 14th, 2015

What drives a story? It would be pleasant if a single right answer existed, but I fear the truth is complicated. A story can be driven forward by many things—by characters or ideas, by plot or language. While some of us may prefer a given central aspect (I myself prefer character-driven stories), there's no doubt that many options can be used.

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An Ode to Middle Grade Authors

August 14th, 2015

“What’s Middle Grade?” My friend’s question makes me grimace. It’s all I can do not to shout at her across the café table. I bite my tongue and think of all the times I’ve been asked that question—even by those in the writing game. Middle Grade is so often overlooked or lumped into other categories, like Early Reader or Young Adult. “Ages eight through twelve,” I reply, but it’s not what I really want to say.

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David Thomson's 'Suspects' and the Questionable Validity of Fan Fiction

August 13th, 2015

First of all, let’s get out of the way what fan fiction is not: it is not commissioned or embraced by the official owners of an intellectual property, whether that’s corporate entity or creator. This is a necessary definition because it is an evolving concept, what with the Internet providing a platform for the proliferation of material that in the past would have sat on someone’s desktop or, more than likely, stayed in the back of their brain.

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Product Review: Her Story

August 13th, 2015

images courtesy herstorygame.com We're in an era where the distinctions between games, films and prose fiction are blurred, creating environments that are both engaging and immersive for the player/viewer/reader—satiating, simultaneously, a critical need for quality entertainment, and more subconscious, vicarious and perhaps even voyeuristic desires.

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Post-Apocelliptical: The New Old Face of the Post-Apocalypse

August 12th, 2015

I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic fiction, which is probably why my first novel ended up squarely in the genre. And while I grew up with tales of irradiated wastelands, post-apocalyptic stories these days tend to stick to more familiar topics like pandemics and zombies. My own novel, Falling Sky, uses disease as a catalyst. It makes sense — diseases, pandemics scare us. They are a present threat whereas nuclear war, well, it’s a lot further down the list. When Falling Sky came out, Ebola was all over the news.

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Six Ways to Survive the Query Trenches

August 12th, 2015

Every writer knows that publishing is a notoriously slow process, and waiting at any stage of the game can be pure hell. Never is that more true than when you're in the Query Trenches.

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Truman Capote reviews 'Go Set a Watchman'

August 11th, 2015

Excuse me if I sound a little irritated today, but I should explain that here in the corner of Heaven reserved for Famous Dead Authors, the organizing committee, chaired this year by that meddling busybody Agatha Christie, recently changed the system for choosing our overall Paradise experience. For some time Norman Mailer and I had charmed and bribed enough votes from our fellow-authors to ensure that the Hereafter permanently took the form of Studio 54 in its 1970s heyday.

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10 Tips On How To Write A Press Release

August 10th, 2015

If you’re running a publishing house or self-publishing, sooner or later you’ll need to write a press release. Sure, there are other ways to get the word out—like door-to-door cold calling, physical theatre and old school intimidation—but the press release is a more traditional approach, and unlikely to land you jail time or judgement… provided you get it right.

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