Columns

The Best Comic Books About Bad Guys

October 29th, 2012

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, here’s a column dedicated to all those nasty characters we love to hate and hate to love—the bad guys. While compelling villains that prove more fascinating than the hero are certainly not unique to comic books, it is the one place where you see it explored in abundance. A handful of literature’s greatest antagonists might get a novel written about them decades after their original creator is dead. A good supervillain can star in his own ongoing title, and thus keep living, scheming, and returning to wreak havoc forever.

Read Column →

Ask The Agent: How to Perfect Your Elevator Pitch & The Low-Down on Agency Assistant Salaries

October 29th, 2012

Navigating the rough terrain of today’s publishing industry shouldn’t be a solo event. This week in Ask the Agent, I’ll explore and dissect two of the industry’s mysteries, straight from the shoulder. Question from Lauren Can you give us some tips on writing loglines/elevator pitches? I'm having a hard time boiling everything down to a line or two.

Read Column →

Recap: The Walking Dead 3.03 - Walk With Me

October 29th, 2012

Beware spoilers.  Oh, Merle, how we have missed thee.  This speaks to the strength of Michael Rooker. It's commendable how he can make you glad for the return of a racist psychopath. There was something incredibly endearing to him tonight--maybe because the writers are toning down the cartoonish nature of the character, and playing up the actor's charisma. He's also helped along by the badass knife arm that's replaced the hand he hacked off back in the first season.

Read Column →

Death Turns The Page: Seven Notable Literary Kills

October 26th, 2012

Most of the time proper literature deals with death, it is presented as a beautiful thing: a knight's brave sacrifice, a lover's romantic suicide, an old person's fond farewell. But this spooktacular time of year pulled my focus towards another kind of literary death. You know, those dark and dastardly acts that run the bloodthirsty gamut from spine-tingling to gut-churning. The murders.

Read Column →

Your Favorite Book Sucks: 'World War Z - An Oral History of the Zombie War'

October 26th, 2012

'Your Favorite Book Sucks' is an ongoing column, written by different people, that takes a classic or popular book and argues why it isn't really all that great. Confrontational, to be sure, but it's all in good fun, so please play nice. This Won’t Be A Popular Opinion. I don’t like World War Z.

Read Column →

The Blagger's Guide to Ayn Rand

October 25th, 2012

To blag (v): to sound like you know what you’re talking about when you don’t The Blagger’s Guide to Literature (n): an invaluable resource for those who wish to blag about books without actually reading them.

Read Column →

Storyville: Dynamic Settings

October 25th, 2012

This column is going to be all about setting. How much is too much, how much is too little? How can I advance the plot, reveal character and ground my story in reality? How do I work all of the senses into my story without feeling like I’m just cramming those details in? How do I make it feel real? I’ll talk about all of these things and what setting means to me, as well as how I work it into my own writing. So let’s get started.

Read Column →

Understanding the Objective Correlative

October 24th, 2012

Theme is tricky business. A story has to be about something, but if you litter the page with obvious thematic cues your writing could come across as didactic and heavy-handed. Getting those big, universal ideas across without “pointing” the reader toward them, or otherwise producing something that reads like an instruction manual, takes a lot of finesse. It’s easier said than done.

Read Column →

The 3 Most Popular Editorial Services and Do You Need Them?

October 24th, 2012

Header image via Pexels Three years ago I headed toward the ‘advice for writers’ shelf at Barnes and Noble. I was beginning my research on advice for writers as I was finally leaving my literary agent mantle behind and making my casual role as publishing counsel official. I was and wasn’t shocked to discover the genre had exploded. I felt as though I was seeing, at the very least, double the titles that were offered a mere five years before.

Read Column →

The DCU New 52 - One Year Later

October 23rd, 2012

Last year DC “flipped the table” by doing a line-wide relaunch of all its books, generally referred to as The New 52 (or a million variations thereof).  DC's relaunch started everything over at #0, including Detective Comics, which had been published monthly since 1937 and was almost at 900 issues, making it the longest ongoing comic in the U.S.  It was a bold move-- and I like bold moves-- but ultimately it didn’t work for me, and I'm going to try my best to explain why.

Read Column →