Columns

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Time is Arbitrary, But My Reading Goals are My Expression of Hope

January 4th, 2021

One of my coworkers likes to wish people a Happy New Year with the caveat/reminder that time is meaningless and circular and our celebrations of a new year (and subsequently, hopes for improvement come Jan. 1) are equally meaningless. Maybe — probably — he has a point. But that hasn't, and won't, stop me from setting my meaningless goals, declaring my intentions for the new year, hanging all my hopes on the idea of a better 2021.

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Writers Don't Need Social Media

December 30th, 2020

Social media. We hate it, but as writers, we have an excuse: “It’s part of the gig!” For us, it’s NECESSARY! All the hate, the stupid arguments, all the politics, all the getting angry at celebrities we don’t even really know for doing things we don’t understand...it’s all part of the game, right? Somehow, we’re all just trapped in this fucking dystopian nightmare where writing down stories also involves shit like Snapchat filters and TikTok stardom?

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Drinking From The Skulls of My Enemies: My New Year's Resolutions

December 29th, 2020

Original Photo by Godisable Jacob I probably pitch a resolutions piece every year. I like the idea that we used twelve months (or they used us) and now we get a new 12-pack. I believe we can use a "new" year to convince ourselves we have a new opportunity, even if the world is still burning and the pandemic isn't over.

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Science Versus Faith in Fiction

December 28th, 2020

Science is a tool writers use to make their characters trustworthy and their stories believable. Science fills in the gaps. Science ties our world to new, fictional worlds. Science is an overused tool in fiction. What Faith Is Here's the briefest version I could come up with to show the difference between the use of faith and science in fiction:

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