Columns

10 Things I Learned Editing an Anthology in Three Weeks

January 27th, 2021

I'm always thinking about putting anthologies together. I love them. I want to edit an anthology of body horror stories about parasites. I want to edit an anthology of stories inspired by the photographic work of the great Weegee. I want to edit an anthology of stories inspired by the music of Tom Waits. I want to edit an anthology of stories celebrating the World Weekly News aesthetic. I want to edit an anthology of found footage stories (actually kinda working on making this one happen right now...). Anyway, you get the point.

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Foreign Terror-tories: 8 Translated Tales to Terrify

January 26th, 2021

Last year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Best Picture Oscar Award to Parasite, the first non-English language film to win that award. Parasite is a Korean thriller/black comedy that teeters on the brink of gothic horror. Just an aside, it's also the last movie my husband and I watched in a movie theater since the COVID-19 global pandemic. I absolutely loved it. I thought the movie was smart, compelling, and suspenseful. The climax blew my mind! 

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The Best of the DC Animated Universe

January 25th, 2021

The characters and stories of DC Comics have inspired a lot of animation over the years. Marvel may rule the box office with its big budget sci-fi action comedies, but DC makes the best cartoons. Once Bruce Timm and company produced the timeless classic Batman: The Animated Series, they were given the keys to the toy chest and allowed to run wild. In addition to other iconic series like Superman and Justice League Unlimited, they started pumping out tons of short animated features for home video viewing. Unsurprisingly, most of them feature Batman.

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The Existential Horror of Making an Author Website

January 21st, 2021

There’s nothing more existential than a writer building a website for themselves. It’s even more challenging than writing a book in a way. Hell, it’s even harder than writing the back copy of a book, because you’re the literal back copy up there on the screen.

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Writers on Writers

January 20th, 2021

Whenever a renowned writer turns their quill on the behind scenes of a fellow penpusher, the results are often a mixed bag depending on the motivations of the author. Revenge or jealousy may be the ignoble impetus, or a devotion so deep that the prose dips into an undigestible worship. Here are four examples of writers who wrote it right—A.E. Hotchner, Eileen Simpson, Salman Rushdie, and Martin Amis—and their balanced memoirs that slip us satisfyingly behind the curtain without antipathy or idolatry.

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Politics, Cash Grabs, and Hair: The End of the Trump Parody Book

January 20th, 2021

If you haven’t sold off your Trump parody book by now, you’re screwed. It was a fun ride and all, but it’s over. I know, I know, impeachment, yadda, yadda. Trust me. Once the dude is de-White-House-ed, one of two things happens:

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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