As promised, I’d like to give you all a little exercise that my fantasy author friends might appreciate and immediately recognize. This is an example of how I do my research, and I’m offering it to you to put more questions in your mind than answers, to challenge not only what you write—but how. For […]
Category: Books & Stories
For Readers
How the Media You Surround Yourself With May Affect Your Writing
Take a moment to think about what information sources you have access to. On a very basic level, you gather information from people or media created by people. Now, if we stop to think about where that media is coming from it’s usually from a group of people focused on a particular belief or a […]
The Other Side of Author’s Intent: The Writer’s World
In college, it wasn’t unusual to get involved in discussions about how important “author’s intent” was to a work. My “fondest” memory was of a professor who was convinced that it didn’t matter that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare; what mattered is that she was supposedly influenced by obstetrics manuals of the period. […]
Don’t be Afraid to Write like Crap
One morning, Little Miss Writer wakes up like she normally does. She gets out of bed, stretches her fingers, and gulps down a cup of coffee. After she’s had the chance to wake up, she sits down at her computer, and starts typing away on her assignment. All of a sudden, tiny microbes of self-doubt […]
“Prey” a Horror Fiction Podcast
I’m happy to report that a flash fiction piece I had written, entitled “Prey” will be published on http://pseudopod.org/ tomorrow. This piece was really fun to write; it is a Lovecraftian-horror scene written from the mind of a bird of prey. I had submitted it to Pseudopod months ago, after winning an Honorable Mention through […]