There is nothing I detest more than tooting my own horn. Blame it on my ancestors, who would rather die than be caught being so jack-all-full-of-yourself as to sit down across from an agent to sell your work. The work, I…
So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…
From Hogwarts to Whoville every fiction writer constructs a world. It’s an artful business even when the settings are based on real places. The best ones are indelible.
Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say. No problem. Easy enough to hang onto the definition: To be compassionate is to both understand and…
We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is anything but.
The pace of change emanating from Washington, D.C., has many of us reaching for books—whether to escape, learn, resist or a little of each–Dead Darlings is here to help.