Columns

Three Books About... Beaches

July 24th, 2014

If you happen to visit Paris during the month of August, you, along with the 1,000,000,000 other tourists, will find all the landmarks for which the City of Light is famous – the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the place where Jean-Paul Belmondo woos Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle – all present and looking exactly like they do in the postcards. Only bigger and more full of French people. All except one.

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The Art of Microfiction

July 24th, 2014

As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Which translated into modern language means, “Everyone should write and read microfiction.” What is Microfiction? It’s a subset of flash fiction—those super short stories typically told in 1,000 words or less. Definitions vary, but for the most part, microfiction is any story told in 300 words or less, and could even be as short as a few words. (At Microfiction Monday Magazine, I use the limit of 100 words.)

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White Guilt: 10 Books For The Betterment Of The Straight White Male

July 23rd, 2014

This intro is impossible. So I'll just go for it. If you read this and start feeling that flush of anger in your face, or if you start chewing the insides of your cheeks with fury, all I can ask is that you read a little further and give me a chance here.

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Play It Again, Sam: Tackling the Rewrite

July 23rd, 2014

Two years ago, I finished the first draft of my manuscript. It was a glorious moment when I typed “THE END”. Then I set it aside to work on other projects, rejoin the living, as we writers do. When I came back to it, though, I grew more annoyed with each revision pass. This wasn’t the story I wanted to tell; some residue was still lodged in my brain, waiting to be scraped out and mixed into the words on the page. But more obnoxious still was that, try as I might, I couldn’t mold the story into what it should be.

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Suspense and Spook: 5 Great YA Horror Titles

July 22nd, 2014

Is there anything quite as wonderful as settling in with a good book, ready to be spooked? When you think of brilliant books that scare your socks off, of course you think of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but why limit yourself to adult horror? There’s a whole world of suspense to be found in the young adult section of the bookstore. From serial killers with Maureen Johnson to bloody ghosts and murder from Kendare Blake, there’s a young adult novel to keep everyone up late at night with the lights on.

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Typos: Funny or Foul?

July 22nd, 2014

ill-eagle via Whall I read everything—signs, cereal boxes, fine print—and I often notice how seemingly obvious errors and typos tend to go unnoticed by just about everyone. The occasional typo or error is no sin, but considering how easy it was for me to find examples of typos in my everyday life for this article, I do start to wonder:

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The Curious, Poetic Lives of the Rossetti Siblings

July 21st, 2014

There are thousands of poets in the world, both living and dead, who don’t receive their fair share of notoriety. Among their ranks are Christina Rossetti, author of “The Goblin Market,” and her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Dante’s works have not weathered the decades as well as his sister Christina’s body of poem—being full of references to Arthurian myth and heavy Medievalism—but his strange biography is intriguing enough to warrant a quick glance back into Victorian London.

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On Kicking Ass: How To Write a Fight Scene

July 18th, 2014

Header image via Afonso Lima This may sound strange, coming from a person who writes for a living on a site dedicated entirely to the craft of writing, but sometimes words fail us. We’ve all found themselves in situations where there’s nothing left to say. Somebody presumes to put hands on you and yours, and they aren’t hearing any arguments. So what then? How do we communicate when our differences can’t be resolved with a conversation?

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5 Silver Linings of Having A Day Job

July 18th, 2014

Let's face it: having a day job sucks. But sometimes life puts us in a position where we have to work outside our writing career, and we can either waste time bemoaning this fact, or we can make the best of it.

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The Importance of Journaling

July 17th, 2014

Photo Credit: TheFancyLamb It all started when I was eight and I got a super cool diary for Christmas. It was soft and squishy to the touch, covered with drawings of teddy bears, the pages were rose scented, and it had a lock on the side so my sisters couldn’t read it. Most importantly, it was the first place where I felt comfortable writing down my thoughts, even if they were simply, Joey tried to hold my hand today and I hated it, or Homework is fun.

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