Columns

Dear Edgar Allan Poe

January 19th, 2021

Letter image via John-Mark Smith Dear Edgar Allan Poe, It’s intimidating writing to you. Would you believe me if I said I wrote this letter seven times only to throw it away, to rip it into pieces, to hide it under my floorboards and pretend it didn’t exist until I had to dig it out and start all over again? I fell in love with you when I was twelve.

Read Column →

What Would Books Look Like If Big Publishing Collapsed?

January 18th, 2021

This last fall, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merged, creating a mega publishing house, the ultimate Rat King of publishers, if you will, that could be putting out about a third of mainstream, published books this year. When something this huge happens in an industry, it often means that the industry is either thriving or dying. What if we woke up tomorrow and big publishing was gone? What would the world look like? Would there be books? What would happen without big publishing?

Read Column →

10 Things Wrong with All My First Drafts

January 15th, 2021

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio Toward the end of 2020 I decided to make a concerted effort to catalog all the stories I’d ever written, from flash fiction to novel length works. I wanted to know the submission and publication histories of everything I’d written. It’s an ongoing process that may warrant its own article. Not counting ghostwritten work, it came out to over 400 stories. Including ghostwriting, it’s over 1000 stories.

Read Column →

Storyville: Writing Horror in a Post-Covid World

January 13th, 2021

Things are still simmering, still escalating in some pockets of this country, and yet, we’re still trying to write stories, pour ourselves into our work, and create original, believable fiction that resonates with the public. How can we do this when truth is stranger than fiction? How can we tap into horror when we’re already surrounded by anxiety and fear? How can we rise up and continue to be creative when the pandemic still looms? Here are some ideas.

Read Column →

Book Promotion Scams You Can Try From Home!

January 12th, 2021

Is there anything better than the story of a scam? I've got one to get us started. My mom, to reduce her sewer bill, came up with a scam. My mom’s sewer bill for the entire year is calculated by the city tallying how much she puts into the sewer for one month. They get that number, multiply by 12, bam, sewer bill set. What the city didn’t count on was someone willing to go pretty far to save a few bucks. If my mom put as little as possible into the sewer during her bill calculation month, she’d save some dough.

Read Column →

Black Bear: Aubrey Plaza, One-Piece Bathing Suits and Acts of Creation.

January 11th, 2021

Scene: Aubrey Plaza is in a red one-piece bathing suit sitting on a dock somewhere in upstate New York.  Her character is named Allison. Allison makes movies. She's headed to upstate New York to write. She may be difficult to work with. She may be married. She's confident and sexy. She has swagger. She definitely lies a lot. 

Read Column →

10 Thrilling Books We’re Anticipating in 2021

January 8th, 2021

The door has finally closed on wretched 2020, and we’re all eagerly looking forward to what we hope will be a much brighter year. What better way to celebrate the start of 2021 than with a list titles we’re most excited to read? Here are our top 10 picks for upcoming books in 2021, in order of release date for your convenience.

Read Column →

Goodreads Dumps Twitter Functionality

January 7th, 2021

In early 2021, Goodreads is expected to remove a lot of its Twitter functionality, including the ability to share directly from within the social platform. Why is this significant? Let’s get into the meat and potatoes of it.

Read Column →

What I Learned From Writing "A Return to Spring"

January 6th, 2021

Author photo courtesy of Gabriel Hart Last month, Mannison Press released my riot-noir novelette, A Return to Spring — a fictionalized, alternate history of the 1986 Palm Springs Riots. The ’86 Riots were a true-crime event that altered that city as we knew it, putting an end to the Spring Break destination for Southern California high school/college kids, ushering in the town’s quieter, more civilized demographic that we see there today.

Read Column →

Anti-Resolutions: Is It Possible to Set No Goals But Still Write Successfully?

January 5th, 2021

Original image via RUN 4 FFWPU First, we need to define terms. We talk about goals in every aspect of our lives—business, education, personal growth, hobbies, health, fitness, etc. We call them milestones, benchmarks, projections, objectives, and targets. If we make them at the beginning of a year, we call them resolutions, and nobody really expects us to stick to them. But what are they really?

Read Column →