When adapted for the big screen, Hollywood’s trend of breaking books, plays, and musicals into Part I and II is hard to see as anything more than a ploy to get audiences to pay twice for a complete story. Dune, Twilight, Harry Potter, etc. All these films represented stories broken in half to allow for…
A while ago, my wife forwarded a link to NYC Midnight’s writing contest, where participants enter into various categories of flash stories, going from a 100-word limit to short stories of 3-4k words. The idea behind it (and others like it) is they issue a Genre, an action, and an object. An example would be…
In a recent conversation with people in my critique group, they asked about any rituals related to the writing process. While good coffee (or tea) is often a must, and some space free of distractions is preferred, the one ritual that comes to mind is my use of music and sound to help sink me…
Thanks to the wonders of social media, Nat Cassidy, one of my favorite horror and crafters of suspense, posted about a new novella. Lesson: don’t discount posting about your books on social media. Once it crossed my feed, I immediately went to my local bookstore, and wouldn’t you know, they had it in stock. It…
A little while ago, someone posted on a writing community Discord server about submissions for a noir-focused anthology. Navigating over to the submissions page, the anthology focused on flash fiction stories to grip the reader and not let go. Perchance, as part of the NYC Midnight competition, I’d written a sci-fi story (which placed first…
Really short post here, mostly to plug the conversation T.C. Burr and I engaged in on the Yet Podcast: One of my favorite things is chatting about the writing process with other authors. Everyone has tools and tricks they’ve discovered, and hearing about them is amazing. I never know when someone will point me in…
Author’s Note: if you want all the querying resource links and none of my rambling, scroll to the end for a handy list. All pictures are direct links to articles. Here are other writing resources if you’re not querying yet. After my third book (the only book my internal monologue deemed potentially “publishable”), I dove…
The latest controversy to befall NaNoWriMo surrounds their stance on the use of generative AI, primarily LLMs (Large Language Models). As an aside, I loathe the overuse (and misuse) of the term AI, and thus, in this essay, I will use LLM instead of this colloquialism. NaNoWriMo’s post is here, if you desire to read…
One of the superpowers of independent bookstores is how curation can change a shopper’s discovery process of otherwise unnoticed books. Page Against the Machine in Long Beach is an example of such a store, with its focus on media related to activism and social/political movements. It then shouldn’t be a surprise that I came across…
The Queen of the Tearling (QotT) almost got DNF’d in the first fifty pages. A perusing of comments on Goodreads (a bad habit I’ve picked up when struggling with a book) revealed many readers calling the MC a Mary Sue. I’m not a fan of this term, though many aspects of the MC fit the…