Columns
Showing 3538 Columns
Red Flag Books
October 13th, 2021
A few weeks ago I saw someone on Twitter refer to Fight Club as a “red flag” movie. You can see the tweet in question here.
Read Column →How Pitch Wars Showed Me Where I Need to Grow - As A Person
October 12th, 2021
This was supposed to be a positive article, an uplifting look at the benefits of Pitch Wars outside of just getting selected. I was going to talk about how the deadline of the submission period forced me to put my head down and work, and crank out a book when I might have otherwise dilly-dallied endlessly. I wanted to shine a light on the community-building aspects of Pitch Wars, which are honestly great.
Read Column →Candyman: A Monster Named 5 Times
October 11th, 2021
We had Clive Barker’s short story: Candyman Then we had a trilogy of movies: Candyman Candyman Candyman And now, with Candyman (2021), we’ve said his name for the fifth time: Candyman
Read Column →Lessons from 10 Years of Writing About Grammar
October 8th, 2021
10 years ago, I made my LitReactor debut with an article about brainstorming story ideas for National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). I find this hilarious now since I only ever did NaNoWriMo once—in 2010—and I’ve never done one since. Not because it’s not a great idea, but because I had my first kid in early 2012 and I haven’t had 2 minutes to myself ever since.
Read Column →LURID: Moral Panic in Poetry — A Quilt for David
October 5th, 2021
Quilt image via the Smithsonian, Author Photo via Twitter As a culture, we’re obsessed with news. We doom scroll through repeated facts and conjecture, absorbing the shrieks of the chorus, constructing a hierarchy of information based on whoever shouts loudest, and first. Then we move onto the next novelty, leaving the old one to rot, often uncorroborated, half-told, sometimes outright wrong.
Read Column →Celebrating 10 Years of LitReactor!
October 1st, 2021
Happy Birthday, LitReactor! Or should I say, Happy Anniversary? What difference does it make? LitReactor has been around for a solid 10 years now, and either way, we are celebrating! I remember our first post like it was yesterday: a news item on a HuffPo feature about our launch. In the final line of the article, author Andrew Losowsky poses the question:
Read Column →Writing with Cognitive Impairments
September 30th, 2021
I might not have degenerative dementia. That’s not as comforting as the doctor telling me that I definitely don’t have degenerative dementia, because what he’s really saying is that I might actually have it. He’s saying that because I have symptoms of degenerative dementia. As a full-time author, as a creative person, as a husband, as a father, and simply as a human being, I find this prospect troubling for a lot of reasons
Read Column →Crime and Opportunity: When True-Crime Won't Sustain A Narrative
September 28th, 2021
Image via RODNAE Productions The following is a story I wrote about the story I refused to write.
Read Column →The Wisdom of Alan Watts: Improve Your Life and Creativity
September 27th, 2021
Author photo via Wikipedia I first became interested in Alan Watts after a conversation with Matt Cardin on the This Is Horror Podcast where he recommended reading The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety.
Read Column →
