Columns

Nothing New Under the Mistletoe - 40 Versions of "A Christmas Carol" You Should Check Out

December 23rd, 2020

When it comes to Christmas stories, there is nothing new under the mistletoe. Year after year after year, we are bombarded with tales of respect for humankind, family togetherness, redemption, and miraculous snowstorms that move in at 11:59:59 on Christmas Eve. (In fact, Hallmark Channel is airing 40 NEW Christmas movies this year!) It’s as much a part of 21st Century Christmas in the United States as online shopping and blow-up lawn Santas.

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Storyville: Body, Mind, and Soul—Adding Depth to Your Stories

December 22nd, 2020

If you’ve been following this column and my teachings, then you know I talk a lot about Freytag as a guiding force in my work. That’s one structure, one path forward, and it works for me. You know—the narrative hook, the inciting incident, exposition, increasing tension, internal and external conflict, leading to a climax, resolution (with change), and denouement.

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Using Bibliomancy as a Drafting Tool

December 21st, 2020

Bibliomancy is a traditional divinatory practice that can be found across all religions, and it uses passages from books or sacred texts as a way to predict and interpret future events and our relationship to moral and emotional predicaments. Historically it has an interesting past, because while the church was against fortune telling or augury due to its ties to witchcraft and heathenism in the middle ages, bibliomancy was allowed because it used the Bible, the Qur’an, the Torah, etc.

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Trello for Authors

December 18th, 2020

Trello is an online organizational tool for individuals, teams, and businesses. There is a free version and then a paid version with lots of bells and whistles. The free version has everything I need for now. There are a number of tutorial videos you can find on YouTube about general features and applications for team projects in a corporate setting. I’m going to focus on how I use Trello for myself as an author. Getting started is as easy as going to Trello.com and signing up. But how do you use it?

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On Using Personal History As Fiction

December 17th, 2020

Author photo via Wikipedia Some years ago - eleven to be exact - I was just coming out of a twelve month period of personal and legal hell... better known as a bad divorce. Now, the expression ‘a good divorce’ may be something of an oxymoron...

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That Time I Ran a Virtual Literary Festival (and Lived to Tell the Tale)

December 16th, 2020

The Festival Four years ago I helped launch (and subsequently run) The Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. It was the brainchild of two Charlestons on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Charleston in Sussex, England, was the country home of Bloomsbury painters Vanessa Bell (sister to Virginia Woolf) and Duncan Grant, and is home of one of England's premiere literary Festivals.

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LitReactor Staff Picks: The Best Books of 2020 - Part III

December 15th, 2020

Another year has come and gone. You know what that means, don't you? Time for a bunch of strangers to tell you what was good! And why should you care what the LitReactor staff thinks are the best books of the year? Trick question! You shouldn't. But what they have to say might interest you nonetheless, because they are good-looking and knowledgeable and they read like the wind. So for those who care, we submit for your approval/derision some of LitReactor's favorite reads of 2020 (part 3).

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The Case for Amazon

December 14th, 2020

Some columns you write to make people happy, some you write to make yourself happy...and some you write because they’ll make no one happy, but something’s got to be said. Amazon is doing some things right. And not just in a, “They make a lot of money, might makes right, ends justify the means” sense. Amazon has, in some ways, made the book world a better place.

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5 Ghost Stories to Help You Haunt the Holidays

December 11th, 2020

There is a longstanding tradition of telling ghost stories on the eve of the winter solstice. Favored folk festivities have brought friends and family around the yule log, spending the longest night of the year enveloped in tales of specters, mischievous fairies, and ancient deities and spirits alike, but while this time of year is a period to entertain and spend time with loved ones, it’s also a time to pause and reflect and get in touch with our shadow selves.

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10 Things I Learned Live Streaming the Writing of My 50K Word NaNoWriMo Novel

December 10th, 2020

It’s as crazy as it sounds. On its own, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is enough of a challenge for authors. The endgame—to create a 50,000 word novel in a month. I decided to write my 50,000 words over the course of 20 days, all while live streaming on Twitch. If you’re quick, you can see the videos on my Twitch channel before they disappear after 60 days. I have Gaming Prime, formerly Twitch Prime, available as a bonus with Amazon Prime, and 60-day storage of videos is one of the perks.

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