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The Girl Who Starred In All The Books
April 20th, 2015
With the English translation of Stieg Larsson's first Millennium trilogy novel, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, hitting American bookshelves in late 2008, a publishing trend took its first steps out of the primordial ooze and ventured onward. The release of the second and third books, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, respectively, helped spread this trend further, solidifying its prevalence even today, seven years later.
Read Column →Path to Publication 3.6: Blurbs And Reviews, Incoming
April 20th, 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. Let's talk about blurbs. Asking for blurbs is really awkward.
Read Column →Exercises All Writers Need To Do
April 17th, 2015
Once upon a time, there was a romantic vision of writers treating their bodies terribly. Opiates, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and cigarettes were an integral part of the tortured writer stereotype. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was known for her opium addiction. William S.Burroughs was a heroin addict. Then there are the myriad of writers, past and present, with alcohol issues: Hemingway, Bukowski, Fitzgerald, Poe, Bukowski, to name a few…
Read Column →14 Reasons We Love List Articles
April 17th, 2015
In my time as a freelancer, I've written hundreds of list articles. That's not a joke or an exaggeration. Literally hundreds. When I pitch multiple article ideas, the ones most commonly selected seem to be the list articles. And hell, even when I write articles in a non-list form, lo and behold, an editor decides to number my sub-headings and transform my work into a list.
Read Column →The Minds of Others: 6 POV Hacks for Fiction
April 16th, 2015
Point of view (POV) in fiction is often one of the hardest elements for new writers to master, with good reason. Regardless of whether you choose the first person (I), third person (he or she), or second person (you) in any of their various incarnations, there are things that you, the author, know that your protagonist cannot. Things, perhaps, you would like your reader to know.
Read Column →Brainstorm Your Next Novel with Fiasco - Part 2
April 15th, 2015
Welcome back to Brainstorming with Fiasco! In the previous installment we figured out who some of the characters of our fictional town were and what kind of relationships connected them. Now it’s time to fill in some more Details about the town and what the characters are trying to do in it. There are three types of Details:
Read Column →LURID: Death Becomes Her
April 14th, 2015
LURID: vivid in shocking detail; sensational, horrible in savagery or violence, or, a guide to the merits of the kind of Bad Books you never want your co-workers to know you're reading.
Read Column →'The Babadook': A Lesson In Subtext
April 10th, 2015
This month, Shout! Factory, that venerable source for outstanding Blu Ray releases of both classic and underrated and/or forgotten horror titles, will release a special edition of The Babadook, one of the most critically-celebrated films of 2014, and one praised by horror fans and casual viewers alike. On the same day as Shout! Factory's Blu Ray release (April 14th), the film will also be available to stream on Netflix, so there's no excuse not to see it if you haven't already.
Read Column →Don’t Freak Out, But You Just Discovered a Novel You Wrote When You Were a Teenager
April 10th, 2015
So you were searching through an old hard drive for a celebrity sex video you had saved a long time ago, but the only thing you ended up finding was a Word document of a novel you’d written when you were fourteen. Does that successfully sum up the events of the last ten minutes? Who the hell are you? How did you get into my bathroom?
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