Columns

Why 2021 Was America's Worst Reading Year

April 5th, 2022

Why did you fuck-ups stop reading last year? A Gallup poll told us that Americans read fewer books in 2021 than they had…maybe ever. What the hell happened? The decrease in average number of books read per adult last year wasn’t so much about people going from reading one or two books a year to reading nothing. It’s mostly due to people who normally read a shitload slacking off in 2021.

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Celebrating Kidlit this International Children's Book Day

April 1st, 2022

Image: ibby.org In honor of International Children’s Book Day (April 2, 2022), I’d like to take some time to rant and rave about children’s literature. I’ve been deeply immersed in the world of kidlit, mostly through my love of reading and writing YA, for at least six or seven years now. Which means I didn’t really start thinking critically or engaging with kidlit until I was…literally in my 20s, and not a kid anymore.

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Book Marketing Like a Rock Star

March 31st, 2022

Header art by Matthew Revert Look, straight up, for roughly the past 4 years I’ve royally sucked at promoting my own writing. I’ve half-assed the marketing of my books. I'm not sure why, but I haven't given it much of an effort.

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Friday the 13th: Even Better Than the Real Thing

March 30th, 2022

Sometimes you just wanna play with someone’s else’s toys, especially when you don’t have their permission.  I recently published a bootleg comic book called Friday the 13th Part IX : The Last Mask. It’s a bloody, loving tribute to Jason Voorhees, one of pop culture’s most enduring boogeymen. I don’t own the rights to the character of Jason, or to the title Friday the 13th, but I wrote and drew the comic anyways.  Why?

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March is the Perfect Month to Give up on Your Goals for the Year—But Hold on!

March 29th, 2022

Header image via Andrea Piacquadio March is the best month for giving up on New Year’s resolutions. Some of us quit sooner, but this is the month most people drop the pretense of meeting goals made in the heady days between Christmas and New Year’s.

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Transactional Networking is Trash Networking

March 25th, 2022

What is transactional networking? Transactional, by definition, is a term for something related to the exchange of goods or services; buying and selling. "Quid pro quo," as Hannibal Lecter would say. Networking is the organic process of interacting with others in a social construct to share ideas and information, developing professional relationships.

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The Banality of Evil In Fiction

March 24th, 2022

Just in case you don’t feel like reading this whole article, let’s get this out of the way: Don’t write a character who’s evil because “he has an uncontrollable lust for power.” That shit is boring. There’s no story in it. I’d love to tell you more if you’ve got a minute, but if you're busy, just know that a character who is evil because he’s a power-mongering evildoer is a snooze. A Little More Hey, you stuck around! Good on you. And me.

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A Tour Through The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside

March 23rd, 2022

Header and photos by Annie Connole I had been itching to visit the Eaton Collection since last year, when our local Space Cowboy Books did a live online interview with its curators; exploring the aisles, behind the scenes inner-workings, and history of one our country’s largest archival collections of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. When my pitches opened up, I made sure it would be my next piece for Lit Reactor — a two birds with one stone reason to finally bask in its hallowed walls.

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How to Keep Your Head Up When Publishing is Hell

March 22nd, 2022

I started querying my first novel in December 2014. I was a senior in college, and had spent the summer leading up to that Christmas query-fest googling things like “how to get published” and “agents who represent YA novels.” I got a bunch of rejections and a handful of partial requests, and have this distinct memory of sitting in my therapist’s office before spring break, telling her about one of the requests, stars in my eyes as I fantasized about my dreams coming true in the next few weeks. 

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Storyville: From Baseline to Variation—How to Set and Expand Expectations

March 21st, 2022

In the past I’ve spoken in this column about setting up horror stories before tearing it all down, how to use Freytag to create your structure, and the balance between terror (suspense, clues, hints, foreshadowing) and horror (the reveal, the violence, the truth, the monstrou

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