Columns

Back-to-School with Six Historical YA Fictions

September 11th, 2014

With back-to-school on everyone’s mind, what better way to further your education than with a novel set in a historical time period? From Lindsay Smith’s KGB spy thriller set in Communist Russia to Makiia Lucier’s page-turning suspense story about the struggle to survive the 1918 pandemic flu, we are exploring six books that richly depict life in a specific time period.

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Six Tips for Troubleshooting the Novel

September 10th, 2014

The most prolific authors will pen something like forty novels over the course of their careers. Busy acquisitions editors will work with hundreds of those stories, but mainly just the ones that already work (perhaps with a few tweaks here and there). Independent editors are different in that we will work with just as many, if not more, novels over the course our professional lives, but it's our job to actually make them work. (Or help in this regard as much as humanly possible.)

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Where Lit-Fic and Horror Converge: Ten Literary Chillers

September 9th, 2014

I think for genre definitions, we really need look no further than Richard Thomas, a short-story-publishing beast, frequent instructor here at LitReactor and author of the ongoing nuts-and-bolts column Storyville (also featured on this website).

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LURID: Get Your Motor Running — Bad Boy Bikers in Fiction and Memoir

September 8th, 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.

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Culling the Classics: 'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath

September 5th, 2014

LitReactor presents a special guest edition of Culling the Classic! The Book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Heinemann, 1963) The Numbers The first paperback edition, brought out in 1972, sold out the first printing of 375,000 copies in a month, and since then trade has been brisk. Total copies sold must number in the millions.

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Storyville: Writing a Novel Without Plotting it Out

September 5th, 2014

How do you write a novel without plotting? That’s insane, right? For me, it’s all about exploring the characters, sitting in their emotions, and making decisions based on logic, passion, conflict, and survival. It allows me to be more honest, and to follow the story to places that aren’t predetermined. For me, it keeps it fresh and exciting. Here are some tips. I hope they help.

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Why Are Textbooks So Fucking Expensive?

September 4th, 2014

Pardon my French, but when a required textbook costs up to $300, it’s time to resort to expletives. September comes as a punch in the wallet for students everywhere. I doubt anyone will die of shock to hear that the price of higher education is out of control. It’s astronomical in the most literal sense; college bills have shot through the roof, past the stratosphere, and are hanging out somewhere near the Milky Way.

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Comic Book vs. Film: Guardians of the Galaxy

September 3rd, 2014

Beautiful imperfection. It’s a term art critics have bandied about almost as long as there has been art to critique. The idea is that even in the most masterful works, it is the mistakes and shortcomings that give the piece its real character, and provide the truest insight into the creator. Maybe it’s because we admire perfection, but we understand flaws?

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Path to Publication 3.1: Second Time's the Charm!

September 3rd, 2014

After the collapse of my first book deal, I'm back in business—Polis Books will release my debut novel, New Yorked, in June 2015, and has contracted me for a follow-up, City of Rose. This is a monthly column about taking a book over the finish line.  June 9th. 

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The Top 10 Excuses For Not Writing

September 2nd, 2014

Many people who want to become writers do so only to find that they can’t write. I don’t mean that in a qualitative sense—their writing sucks—but in a quantitative sense: they can’t come up with any words. It’s a wretched state to be in at first, but in order to sustain unproductive misery over the long haul, one needs to have a list of excuses close at hand to fend off the inquiries of smug and superior friends and gloating fellow writers. The following excuses serve that function. Please note that two of them are true stories.

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