Columns

Murder Most Foul: Five Killer YA Mysteries

March 23rd, 2015

Who says Young Adult literature has to be all love triangles and fluff? In these five novels, the authors have murder on their minds, and no crime is too grisly, even for a YA audience. From missing girls meeting tragic ends to mysteries surrounding unsolved murders, authors like Paula Stokes and Abigail Haas are exploring murder and mayhem. Their books are sure to have you reading with the lights on.

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Boozing Like Famous Writers

March 20th, 2015

I hate to think of myself as a pile of stereotypes, a bunch of checkboxes with marks for either yes or no. But if I'm honest, there are some stereotypes that are true of me. I'm a white male. I'm a terrible dancer. This is true about me. I'm ridiculously bad at basketball. Unbelievably bad. If you want to disprove the stereotypes there, find someone else. I'm not your guy.

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Post-Mortem: Exploring 'Finnegans Wake'

March 20th, 2015

“Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and she of it” (213).

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Trash or Treasure? A List of Five Obscure Literary Movements

March 19th, 2015

Hermeticism, Spiralism, Futurism— there are a lot of ‘isms’ once you start to venture into this territory. Major literary movements like Realism and Romanticism are bandied about in liberal arts classrooms across the world, but not every idea finds a solid foothold in history. Just as there are innumerable faceless writers whose works have slipped from public visibility, there are whole literary movements and sub-movements that have been mostly swallowed up by the past.

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I Didn’t Know Author Jason Mott Was Black. Does That Make Me a Racist?

March 19th, 2015

When I discovered the book The Returned, I read it, loved it and decided to talk about it on the Unprintable podcast. Then I thought the author might like to hear the segment (authors generally like listening to people say nice stuff about their books), so I searched for Jason Mott on Twitter, so I could tweet him the link.

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Storyville: Ten Sexual Influences That Really Work

March 18th, 2015

In the wake of all of the Fifty Shades of Grey hype and criticism, I thought I’d make a list of ten BETTER sexual influences for writers. These are books, stories, authors and films that I think will give you a much better grasp of how to write sex scenes—the power struggles, the deviations, and the actual physical interaction. Hope this helps.

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How To Get Lucky With Your Next Read

March 18th, 2015

Photo Credit: Romano Carrattieri (Flickr) One of the most heart crushing truths of all time is that you will never be able to read every single book. There are so many titles, stories, characters, and options! Where do you begin? What happens if you spend your life reading all the wrong books? Disaster! But wait.

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Path to Publication 3.5: Galleys, Bookstores, Marketing, and Putting the Pedal to the Metal

March 17th, 2015

Polis Books will release my debut novel, New Yorked, in June, with the follow-up, City of Rose, slated to follow in 2016. This is a column about taking a book over the finish line. It's been two months since I checked in, and suddenly it feels like things are moving at warp speed. Screw the pleasantries. There's a lot to talk about, so let's dive in...

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Library Love: Go Forth and Wiki!

March 16th, 2015

Image by Matthew (WMF) Wikipedia used to be my nemesis. I spent so much time and effort explaining how to find peer-reviewed sources to students, and then they would turn around and use Wikipedia. Because it's easy. And often the first thing to show up in a Google search. The fact that anyone — like anyone off the street! — could write an entry was a real issue to me and my academic peers. Where was the quality control? Nowhere, I thought.

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Neil Gaiman Live in Tulsa: An Eyewitness Report

March 16th, 2015

Teresa Miller, the evening's MC and executive director of the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers (housed within Oklahoma State University-Tulsa) called author Neil Gaiman a "rock-star," a label that has been applied to him before.

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