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UPDATED WITH WINNER - LitReactor's Flash Fiction Smackdown: April Fool's Edition

May 1st, 2015

Flash fiction: A style of fictional literature marked by extreme brevity. Welcome to LitReactor's Flash Fiction Smackdown, a monthly bout of writing prowess. How It Works We give you inspiration in the form of a picture, poem, video, or prompt. You write a flash fiction piece using the inspiration we gave you. Put your entry in the comments section. One winner will be picked and awarded a prize.

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Five Captivating YA Fantasies

April 30th, 2015

When it comes to transporting readers to a whole new world, no genre is quite as creative and captivating as fantasy, and in young adult literature, there is a wealth of stories just waiting to take you away. Although every fantasy novel is bound to be rich with imagined worlds and tried and true tropes, no two stories are quite the same.

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The Element of Surprise: An Anti-Spoiler Manifesto

April 30th, 2015

Pictured above: River Song, a character from Doctor Who. She WILL shoot you if you talk about spoilers. Science has already (somewhat) proven that spoilers don't inherently ruin any chance of enjoying a narrative. In a 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of California San Diego, participants were given twelve short stories, some of which contained spoilerific paragraphs imbedded in the text, some without. Across the board, the readers tended to favor the stories whose plots were revealed ahead of time.

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Five Ways Scrivener Can Help Your Work In Progress

April 29th, 2015

Writing is like weaving. First, you plan your design, calculating the type and amount of yarn required.  Then, you load up your equipment with the necessary colors and lengths of threads.  You pull a series of threads together and stretch them taut to define your work’s form and shape.  This is the warp.  Then you shuttle back and forth in a perpendicular direction with more threads over your warp. This is the weft, the repeating colors and designs that make your work unique and substantial. 

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In Defense Of The Big 6

April 29th, 2015

You all know I love the indies, right? I think I've established that on more than a few occasions. I love their creativity and their willingness to take chances on new authors and difficult subject matter. Hell, my next four books are being published by an indie publisher, so you know I have nothing but love for small and micro presses. But you know who else I love? The Big 6.

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Comic Book vs. Television: Powers

April 29th, 2015

Superhero adaptations are all the rage these days. So much so that the movies are no longer big enough to contain them all, and they are spilling into primetime television with increasing regularity. The latest to get the small-screen treatment (courtesy of the PlayStation Network) is the Eisner-winning series Powers, created by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming.

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I Killed Twenty People (But Not the Dog): 10 Things I Learned Writing HIT, My Violent Teen Assassin Novel

April 28th, 2015

In order to save her mother, a teen is forced to become an indentured assassin in this sizzling dystopian thriller...

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The Brick by Brick Method of Writing

April 28th, 2015

I spent a year and a half anxiously procrastinating work on my thesis. Then, after dozens of hours writing in a haphazard way that led to bloated versions of the project that I couldn't possibly finish, I implemented some ideas from the world of project management. By synthesizing these ideas with my own writing process, I was able to develop a method that broke past my anxiety and allowed me to build an 80-page thesis over the course of roughly three weeks.

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Culling the Poetry Classics: T.S. Eliot

April 27th, 2015

Apparently April truly is the cruellest month. The Poet Thomas Stearns "T.S." Eliot (1888-1965); Anglicized American;  born in St. Louis, Missouri. One of the most important poets of the 20th century on either side of the Atlantic, especially as an exemplar of the Modernist tradition that would dominate much of the 1900s. Winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. Died in Kensington, London, England, at the age of 76.

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5 Things I Would Like To See The Crime Fiction Community Stop Doing In 2015

April 24th, 2015

Alrighty, so you all know I love crime fiction, right? I mean, I really wouldn't have much of a career without it, so obviously I'm pretty nuts about it. But, there are certain aspects of the crime fiction community (which I also love) that I find just a wee bit annoying.

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