Columns

Phraseology: Groups of Words with a Lot of Jobs

January 29th, 2013

If you read my articles fairly often, you've probably heard me go on and on about sentences and clauses, but noticed I’ve dodged the topic of phrases…until now.

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LURID: Slaughterhouse Blues - The Abattoir in Horror

January 29th, 2013

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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Book vs. Film: Kiss Me Judas vs. Fractured

January 25th, 2013

It all started with a comment from jacks_username. The topic of discussion was film adaptations: I'd love to see the Phineas Poe books adapted into movies as well. Fun fact: a film maker actually adapted Kiss Me Judas into a film without permission from the author or publisher. Rumor is that the film is still floating around.

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Judge A Book By Its Cover

January 25th, 2013

I'm not a huge fan of the aphorism "don't judge a book by its cover." Well, actually, I think in the case of Young Adult fiction you should follow that adage, because all YA covers are dirt and some of the books are quite good. But in general, I say go ahead and judge 'em. In this day and age as publishers spend more and more money on art design, the best books have the best covers, and the worst books have covers like this. 

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5 Childhood Books Still on my Shelf

January 24th, 2013

When my family moved to Norway from Scotland, we took the opportunity to dejunk our lives. We hired a skip. We filled it. We hired another one and filled that too. We visited the charity shops with bags full of clothes and wedding presents we had never used. We went to the local rubbish dump with the things which wouldn’t fit in the second skip. We went to the charity shop with bags of toys, more clothes, our artificial Christmas tree (we were on first name terms by then). Anything we could sell – cars, furniture - we sold. Anything we could give away, we gave away.

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9 Modern Tools Every Writer Should Use

January 24th, 2013

I have a friend who types only on typewriters. His study is full of them; he and his girlfriend, he told me, feel bad for these dying symbols of the writing craft. Any time they see one in a shop window they have to "adopt it." There's a romance to this notion, but my own approach takes the opposite route: As soon as a modern tool proves it can make me more effective, I sink my teeth into it. Here are nine tools I've found to be especially useful to both my creative writing and my freelance career.

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Library Love : The Sexy Librarian And Our Collective Imagination

January 23rd, 2013

There’s no use denying it: men and women alike are familiar with the image of the sexy librarian. If you’d like to conduct some research on the subject, I recommend you start with two arenas: fashion and porn. In my view, nowhere else can you get such a clearly defined image of the stereotype.

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Adventures in Self-Publishing Part 6: Fare Thee Well

January 23rd, 2013

There are a lot of things I wish I did better. One of those things is: Maintain a more rigorous writing schedule, something I've never been very good at (I have the attention span of oh my god I just saw something shiny). One of the things that keeps me from writing is that I spend an awful lot of time writing about writing. And it's a gas. I love doing it. It ain't like I'm never going to do it again. But I think I need to cut back a bit.

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Bringing the Lie to Life: What Your First Two Pages Can Tell You

January 22nd, 2013

I was once running a workshop at the Boulder Writing Studio when a student handed me a list. It had been compiled by a man named Gordon Mennenga, of Coe College, and had been passed around after the University of Iowa Writing Festival in Iowa City, until it ended up in my hands, here in Colorado. Unlike most such lists we see passed around writers circles, it was not a list of must-read books, and it was not a list of common mistakes writers should avoid, and, as much as most of us may have wanted it to be, it was not a list of Glengary-like leads on agents and editors.

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Extraordinary Leagues: Crossovers in Fantasy

January 22nd, 2013

There’s something compelling about the idea of the crossover, of taking characters from different settings, sometimes even different worlds, and having them interact. There’s an intriguing juxtaposition of the familiar with the new, and changing the context of a character can often illuminate them in ways that might not have been obvious before. This idea pops up in comics, film, and of course in literature.

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