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Read and Repeat: Finding the Perfect Comfort Book
November 17th, 2014
Grab the hot chocolate and a fleece blanket. November is an ideal month for curling up inside with a book, but most people don't lunge for the Chicago Manual of Style when they've had a long day. Comfort is often defined as a sense of being at ease, or the opposite of stress. Daniel Miller describes the sensation in The Comfort of Things as being attained through the presence of familiar objects.
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Scandal! 6 Writers with Page-Turning Lives
November 14th, 2014
Shy. Reclusive. Introverted. These badges are often stuck on us writers as a group. We’ve long been typecast as putting so much energy into the characters we create that our own lives are dull in comparison. Well, guess what? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges! As a reminder of how we can be as wild and crazy as other artists, here are six writers who lived fast, kicked ass and gave their friends, lovers and biographers something to write home about.
Read Column →Edit My Paragraph! Episode Six
November 13th, 2014
First up this episode we have gingermutt with the following paragraph:
Read Column →LURID: The Horror of 'Heart of Darkness'
November 13th, 2014
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 →Storyville: Avoiding Tropes in Horror
November 12th, 2014
Today we’re going to be talking about tropes, and how to avoid them while writing horror stories. What exactly is a trope? Wikipedia says a trope can be described as “…commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works.” These are the standard expectations and formulas, and while they aren’t inherently bad, what we’re looking to do here is avoid the common, the normal, the expected, and the bland. How can you change and innovate your writing?
Read Column →A Brief History of Space Opera
November 11th, 2014
When people think of science fiction, odds are good they’re actually thinking of space opera, a subgenre of science fiction. While there are all kinds of futuristic stories to tell, we tend to think of all science fiction as spaceships and lasers. But that’s like thinking only of oranges when you’re actually talking about all fruit, or thinking only of Victoria Beckham when you’re actually talking about the Spice Girls … which none of us do, I’m sure.
Read Column →How Male Entitlement Ruins the Best and Purest of Things
November 10th, 2014
It probably says something about me that until early October this year, the whole phenomenon known as alt-lit had flown under my radar, Russian stealth-fighter fashion, which is no mean feat for a literary movement which appears, from the descriptions of those outside it, to be all about self-exposure on whichever social media forum happens to be most public.
Read Column →5 Things Bodybuilders Know That Writers Don't
November 7th, 2014
I'd think it was crazy too if I were a normal person. -Jay Cutler, bodybuilder At the risk of going even further to the bro side of things than the title would indicate, I'll start with a little story about FHM.
Read Column →7 Things To Expect When You Date A Reader
November 7th, 2014
Readers are known far and wide to be some of the best people in the world. We are empathetic, focused, and always come through for the literary questions at bar trivia nights. Anyone would want to date a reader, right? Well, before you run to your nearest bookstore looking for “the one,” let me give you the lowdown on what to expect when you date a reader.
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