Columns

Ask The Lit Coach: "How Much Is Too Much With Description?" and More

November 7th, 2011

Another good round of questions this week, writers. Sometimes your questions can be easily answered with a list of DOs and DON'Ts, or a flow-chartesque "if this then that" scenario. But not always.  We have one of each this week, as one writer needs clarity about the literary journal submission process and one writer is searching for the right balance of description in storytelling.

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"Shockaholic" by Carrie Fisher

November 4th, 2011

Carrie Fisher on her latest memoir: Bad news for anyone who thought that Carrie Fisher had stopped talking about herself: Sorry, but after all of her seemingly endless blathering on about her nose-bleed-high-class problems, it appears she has yet another brand-new problem to overshare about (though don’t expect to relate to it). This time, the electro-convulsive-shock therapy she’s been regularly undergoing is threatening to wipe out (what’s left of) her memory.

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What The Hell Ever Happened To... Jeff Noon?

November 4th, 2011

A young bookseller puts a feather into his mouth... ...and that feather was Vurt, the Aurthur C. Clarke Award winning debut of English novelist Jeff Noon. It was sometime in the late 90's, and the pusher was a friend and co-worker operating in full peer pressure mode. "C'mon, hardly anybody's doing it," she intoned. Her logic appealed to the budding literary elitist in me, so with my friend acting as guide, I took the trip.

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Binge: My Love/Hate Relationship with NaNoWriMo

November 2nd, 2011

The very first NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) took place in July, 1999, in the San Francisco Bay area, consisting of a mere twenty-one participants.  The goal: hit 50,000 words by the end of the month.  Alas, the results were admittedly subpar and publication remained elusive, however, somewhere during the process an important discovery was made: it was fun.  Yes, writing with your friends and getting cracked out on power coffee and candy bars was actually a good ti

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Sixth Sense Settings: Writing Rich, Descriptive Scenes

November 1st, 2011

Original image via Pexels What the heck are we talking about? Welcome to November. If you are participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), then you have just embarked on your month-long novelling odyssey. To help you reach your daily word counts, I’m going to focus on ways to enrich your description.

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The Top 10 Scenes In Literature To Bring You Terrorsleep: Part 2

October 31st, 2011

Header image by Ricardo Esquivel Previously on Terrorsleep

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LURID: Does King Deserve The Crown?

October 31st, 2011

Author photo by Shane Leonard via stephenking.com Horror Literature.  Is that an oxymoron? Horror equates to trash. Horror stories cannot be considered as literature.  Whilst good books improve the mind, Horror rots it. If you read trash, you’ll end up with junk for brains. If you read too much Horror, you’ll go blind.

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From Silk Purses to Sows’ Ears

October 28th, 2011

Photo via Freeimages.com Moviegoers whose taste in cinema consists entirely of keeping up with the Joneses, or if they’re confident in their ignorance, being the Joneses - the middlebrow, the great washed – believe that Hollywood takes fine literature and inevitably turns it into shit, though of course the middlebrow euphemism for shit is bad movies. Take The Bridges of Madison County. Now that is a great book, they all agree - but what a bad movie! In fact, The Bridges of Madison County was shit to begin with and shit it remained onscreen.

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Write Characters In A Representation-Free Zone

October 27th, 2011

Photo by zafarrancho It’s common for many writers today — beginners and pros — to deliver characters on a sort of post-modern pedestal. Instead of offering compelling, substantive, flesh-and-blood people, the writer is instead content to use characters as a social springboard to evangelize some sardonic commentary about the modern world as we know it. Regardless of its wide usage, producing characters for quick reader judgment is almost always a bad idea.

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Using Social Networks To Build A Writing Brand, i.e. How To Whore Yourself On Twitter

October 26th, 2011

Header via Free Images So you’ve published a book. Maybe you landed a fat contract from a publishing house. Maybe you went the DIY route, formatted your book and slapped it up on Amazon. Either way, congratulations! You are an author! You are also a brand. And you better put some serious thought into how you sell yourself.  Because here’s the thing: No one’s going to just buy your book. You need to sell it, and more than that, you need to sell yourself.

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