Columns

Five Things You Always Wanted to Know About "The Bridge" But Were Afraid to Ask

August 6th, 2021

Photo courtesy of the author 1 - You adapted this novel from a short story. What were you thinking? A good idea is hard to find, right? So when you come up with something that has legs, you need to corral that sucker and milk it for all it’s worth. I had written a story about a cult run by an evil mastermind called The Father, who engineers females that are part AI, part human.

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The World’s Biggest Books: Everything Is a Measuring Contest

August 5th, 2021

Header image of a facsimile of the Codex Gigas by Michal Maňas. Inserted image of the Klencke Atlas is public domain. While writing about tiny books a few months ago, I discovered that people can be pretty possessive about superlatives, even when it’s a race to create something so small that it can’t be seen by the naked eye.

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Goodreads: A History of Where It All Went Wrong

August 3rd, 2021

The right person will tell you Goodreads is like a digital coffee shop where people can chat over books. A different, also right person will tell you Goodreads is the world’s biggest hellhole, pretending to be a literate, high-society book salon when it’s really just an excellent place to absorb abuse for having an opinion on a book (or, god forbid, for writing one). What happened? Who’s right? Where did it all go wrong?

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On Missing Women: Abandon All Hope

August 2nd, 2021

The first time I realized that "missing women" was both a phenomenon and a genre, I was in a creative writing workshop at Bowling Green State University run by June Spence, and I’d recently tracked down her collection Missing Women and Others.

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10 Best Books to Get Your Travel Back On

July 30th, 2021

Whether you’re already planning hardcore post-pandemic journeys or you’re just keen to see the outdoors again, nothing beats the joy of vicariously exploring a new place — especially after a year in lockdown! A good travel book is the perfect remedy to take our isolated imaginations hundreds of miles away and inspire us to go further in our own ventures, both big and small.

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Big Bugs and Dead Astronauts: The Joys of a Non-Human Narrator

July 29th, 2021

A couple years ago, I had the idea to write a novel from the perspective of a sentient, sarcastic parasite living in the gut of a corrupt public health inspector. I figured a non-human narrator would have some interesting things to say about humanity. The final product, Absolute Unit, is a combination of body horror and crime fiction; the parasite gets tired of living on scraps and decides to use its budding telekinetic powers to conquer the world.

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How to Write Authentic Fiction

July 28th, 2021

Image via Brett Jordan Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. — Philip K. Dick If you want to write something good, it needs to be real.

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Freelance Copywriting Nearly Killed My Voice as A Writer

July 27th, 2021

Original photo via Andrea Piacquadio I spent the years after graduation in awful office jobs with none of my novels finished and a pile of unpublished short stories. I would troll through Duotrope on my lunch break and try to find journals and lit magazines to submit to after each fresh rejection.

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Storyville: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scene Breaks

July 26th, 2021

Over the years I’ve noticed that my students sometimes break their stories in strange places, so I thought I’d write up my thoughts on when, where, how, and why to insert scene breaks into your stories.

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Things Casual Readers Don't Care About

July 23rd, 2021

Original Header image by Toa Heftiba, via Unsplash Let’s talk casual and abnormal readers. Casual readers get in a couple books every year. Maybe more if they’re in a book club. They unwrap a book on Christmas, but they don’t get a book from EVERYONE they know. They might stop at a landmark bookstore on a trip, but they aren’t packing an almost-empty suitcase for their book haul.

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