Columns

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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Embracing the Brutal Brilliance of Pixar

August 10th, 2015

What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against.

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5 Exercises From Comics Creators That Will Save Your Prose

August 6th, 2015

No, we're not talking about this: No, you don't need a motorcycle jacket to support your lower back for your Bizarre Bicycles:

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'Orange Is The New Black' and the Downgraded Protagonist

August 5th, 2015

In 2010, Spiegel and Brau published a memoir by Piper Kerman called Orange Is The New Black. The book detailed Piper's thirteen months spent in a women's correctional facility for her brief involvement in a drug smuggling and money laundering gang ten years prior. While the narrative stuck mostly to Piper's own experiences in prison, her ultimate goal was to shed light on the deeply flawed prison system in America. Since the book was a bestseller, it can be said that goal was more or less accomplished.

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