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Top 10 Ways To Make 'The Walking Dead' Less Stupid, Revisited
March 19th, 2012
This is going to include SPOILERS for the comic and the show. Tread carefully. Back in November, when The Walking Dead finished off the first half of its second season, I wrote The Top 10 Ways To Make 'The Walking Dead' Less Stupid. It was my attempt to address the ways in which the show was completely screwing the promise of its concept.
Read Column →Ask The Lit Coach: "How Does The New Trend In Self-Publishing Affect Literary Agents?" and More
March 19th, 2012
Will U.S. agents consider work from writers abroad? And what is the fate of the literary agent now that the self e-publishing revolution is full throttle? Let's get into it, shall we?
Read Column →Slaying Dragons: Fantasy and Video Games
March 16th, 2012
I have a confession to make. Lately, I’ve been killing dragons. A lot of them.
Read Column →Book Brawl: Sense And Sensibility vs. Pride And Prejudice
March 16th, 2012
Every month I throw two books, somehow related, into the Book Brawl ring to fight it out for the coveted title of literary champion. Two books enter. One book leaves. Today, our contenders are Jane Austen staples Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). Let’s watch these two comedies of manners get impolite, shall we?
Read Column →LURID: Love Love Lovecraft
March 15th, 2012
LURID: vivid in shocking detail; sensational, horrible in savagery or violence, or, a twice-monthly guide to the merits of the kind of Bad Books you never want your co-workers to know you're reading.
Read Column →False Starts, Dead Ends and Bad Beginnings: A Guide to Successful Storytelling Patterns
March 15th, 2012
The beginning. It’s a rough spot for many first drafts. Writers routinely place a disproportionate amount of attention on their introductory paragraphs, for obvious reasons. As a result, beginnings are often the source of some glaring writer’s anxiety: too many thoughts piled on, too many unnecessary components added, pens leaned on too heavily — all habits that diminish the thematic resonance and overall power of the piece. Sometimes we just don’t know where a story is supposed to start.
Read Column →Getting It Right: Accuracy, Truth, and the Fudge Factor
March 14th, 2012
The great thing about fiction writing is: you get to make shit up. The worst thing about fiction writing is: you have to make shit up. Biographers are spared this pleasure/pain double-double-toil-and-trouble. We have to tell the truth, or something like it. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Read Column →No Thanks, Mr Franzen, I Like My Novels Difficult
March 14th, 2012
Let's give praise to Jonathan Franzen. Not only does he write bestselling novels, he also manages to get on everybody's nerves with a few carefully reckless comments.
Read Column →Saga: Brian K. Vaughan's Return To Comics
March 13th, 2012
There's perhaps nothing more cliché than a childbirth scene. We've all seen it done – frequently poorly – a hundred times before. So it only emphasizes Brian K. Vaughan's strengths as a writer that the opening in Saga #1 is a childbirth scene that is anything but cliché. Vaughan both celebrates and subverts our expectations of this scene by creating such fully realized characters that we get a sense of them instantly.
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