Columns

Is It Really Such A Bad Thing To Give The Audience What They Want?

June 26th, 2019

Lots of spoilers for numerous properties ahead... I know many of you are sick of hearing about it at this point, so I promise not to talk about Game of Thrones for very long, but remember when the fandom was more or less in a good place after the Battle of Winterfell in the season 8 episode "The Long Night"? Most everyone celebrated Arya's swooping in from the dark and slaying the Night King, effectively doing what Jon Snow only dreamt of doing for several seasons, as if it was nothing more than swatting a fly.

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The 3 Worst Duties I Performed As A Librarian

June 25th, 2019

This week is my last week as a librarian. After fifteen years working in the same building, I’m moving onto pastures. The usual phrase is “greener” pastures, but I’m not sure yet. Different pastures, for sure. But there’s some parts of my job that I’ll miss. For all the good that comes with change, I liked writing “librarian” in the Occupation field of my tax return every year. When someone cut my hair and asked, “So, what do you do?” I liked my answer.

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5 Horrifying Books Outside The Horror Genre

June 24th, 2019

Someone once told me, a monster is a god without followers, and I think about that often, because it means what we find horrifying is about perspective. A lot of popcorn thrillers would be horror movies if we showed people going into shock and bleeding out after being shot, people's bones breaking or flying out the windshield when they got hit in a car chase, or how people's lives were destroyed after the heroes blew up buildings. Zoom into a beautiful body, and you'll find grotesque processes going on inside the invisible dark underneath the skin.

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Fuck Your Panel on Diversity, What We Need are Diverse Panels

June 21st, 2019

Photo by Magda Ehlers Listen, we needed panels about diversity. We needed them because literature was stuck in the past and, to be honest, it was racist. We needed them because people of color, LGBTQIA folks, and women weren't being invited to speak at conferences. We needed them because diverse voices and experiences were required to expand literature's horizon and help readers feel represented. The list of reasons goes on and on.

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A Series of Small Circles: How "Endgame" Engineered an Effective Ending

June 20th, 2019

Endings are hard. Ask any author what the most difficult part of their job is, and I guarantee “writing endings” is the answer. It demands a perfect balancing act. Your ending must reflect the hero’s entire journey in microcosm and revisit the major themes without getting repetitive. It also has to be surprising yet plausible, so the audience doesn’t see it coming, but still accepts it as a reasonable conclusion. Never mind the cover—most readers will judge your book by its ending.

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Every Single Redwall Book—Ranked

June 19th, 2019

Pick up Redwall in any bookstore, and you might be bemused by the scene on its cover. After all, it’s a funny-looking mouse standing in front of a castle, waving a tiny sword in the air. But this is one book you shouldn’t judge by its cover — it’s the first installment in one of the greatest children’s series of all time.

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6 Books To Celebrate Pride Month

June 18th, 2019

Header background by Steve Johnson I love heritage months so much because they make me think. They make me think about my own experience walking through the world and how it aligns or doesn't with the myriad experiences around me. These months are a focused opportunity to broaden our perspectives and truly appreciate the challenges various communities endure. Pride month is my favorite because it's symbol is the rainbow and it encompasses such a broad range of interesting individuals.

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13 Books That Wouldn't Be Published Today

June 17th, 2019

In his new book of non-fiction, White, Bret Easton Ellis questions whether Cormac McCarthy’s dark western Blood Meridian would be published today. To paraphrase Ellis, Blood Meridian is an aesthetic masterpiece, but it’s also an ideological nightmare. It lives in the spot where aesthetics intersect with ideology. Or, not so much intersect as barrel towards each other like two trucks with burned-out brakes. After those trucks collide, would Blood Meridian come out of the wreckage whole?

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Writing a Novel With Save the Cat!

June 13th, 2019

There is no right way or wrong way to write a novel. All you have to do, as Neil Gaiman once said, is “Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.” But even though there is only one way to write a novel – actually writing it – there are multiple strategies for plotting your novel. Outline? No outline? Pantser? Methodical plotter?

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What Does It take to Get a Job in Publishing?

June 11th, 2019

Photo by Tim Gouw In the summer of 2012, I got an internship at W.W. Norton & Co., a privately-owned publishing company in New York City, known for their anthologies and critical editions. To a girl who grew up reading books in a small town in Pennsylvania, moving to the “biggest” city (Philadelphia was the “big” city) to work in books was the most exciting dream-come-true.

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