Columns

Book vs. Film vs. Audience: The Shining and Room 237

April 8th, 2013

The Book vs. Film vs.

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Recap: Game of Thrones 3.02 - Dark Wings, Dark Words

April 8th, 2013

This is going to contain spoilers for this episode, and also for the books. I won't tell you what happens in the fifth book, or what I think is going to happen in the next episode, but I will talk about differences between the book and the show thus far. Deal with it.

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Top 10 Storytelling Cliches Writers Need To Stop Using

April 5th, 2013

Header image by Viridiana O Rivera Cliché is the enemy of good writing.  We, as writers, are trained to kill clichéd phrases in sentences. But that's not the only place they can hide—they can infect the spaces between the words, too. Clichés can infect storytelling techniques.

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Roger Ebert Dies at 70

April 5th, 2013

Roger Ebert’s death at the age of 70 sparks a number of questions, none of which I am prepared to answer: What was Ebert’s impact on American culture? Was he a great critic? Will his criticism stand the test of time? Will anyone still care what he wrote ten years from now? To all those questions, I must answer – I dunno.

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10 Big-Time Literary Druggies

April 5th, 2013

In the early 1970s, an anti-drug propaganda piece hit the airwaves: a grim-faced fellow displayed a hideous painting purportedly created by someone on acid. It was a violent work, one that appeared to have been painted with barbed wire instead of a brush, and if memory serves, the color palette was limited to black, grey, and a particularly nauseating blood red.

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Six Types Of Poems To Banish Writers Block

April 4th, 2013

April is National Soft Pretzel Month in the U.S. It’s also National Jazz Appreciation Month, National Welding Month, and National Poetry Month. And while we have absolutely nothing against soft pretzels, jazz, or welding, we figured a column pertaining to National Poetry Month would be most relevant to your interests. If we’re wrong, perhaps you could eat a soft pretzel while you read this.

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On Writer's Constipation, The Sophomore Slump and Zombies

April 3rd, 2013

Before I started work on Plague Nation, the second book in my Ashley Parker series, I'd heard fellow writers discuss the Sophomore Slump with varying degrees of emotion from grumbling to near-psychotic ranting, complete with the kind of laughter that generally follows statements like "And they all said I was mad.  MAD, I say!"   At the time, I'd had three or four books published in various genres.

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Cut!: 4 Strategies for Trimming Your Content

April 3rd, 2013

A deluge of unnecessary content or verbiage can destroy your work. When it's time to revise your over-written piece, how can you make cuts that avoid castrating it? Take it from a chronic over-writer: Making cuts isn't an easy process. However, there are some helpful techniques. Here are four strategies I use when revising my own work. 1) Be goal-oriented

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Storyville: Dissecting "Fireflies"

April 2nd, 2013

This week I’ll be dissecting another of my stories, “Fireflies.” It was originally published in Polluto and later online at Circa Review. It’s been a while since I did this, and I’m excited to dig into this story for a number of reasons. First, this was one of my first attempts to write magical realism. It was also one of my first attempts in recent memory to write a short story that had a positive core, a center that was built around love, romance, and nostalgia.

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Defying Decomposition: The Enduring Zombie

April 2nd, 2013

Easter just came (and went) and call me blasphemous, but the holiday always makes me think of zombies. I mean, sure, Jesus came back all intact and full of wisdom, but not everyone does. In the majority of cases, when someone comes back from the dead, they come back rotting and mindless and with a hunger for brains.

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