Here’s the Beef on Stakes
“What’s at stake here?” Sooner or later every fiction writer fields this question. Often the challenge appears as a single word – STAKES? – scrawled on a novel chapter or short story draft, plus or minus a coffee cup ring,…
Category: Genre
Friday Feast: Books For a Long Holiday Weekend
For five seconds, I thought I’d do something a bit more interesting than providing a list of books to read (again). But then I thought, nah. It’s a holiday weekend in both the U.S. and Canada and quite possibly in…
Friday Feast: Crime Novels with Female Leads, Things Women in Lit Have Died From, Book Covers, and OMG Shakespeare
Last week, I disagreed with people who said that Pizza Hut’s new pigs in a blanket pizza is the downfall of civilization. Such opinions are subjective. And subjectivity is something we writers know something about. This week, along with other…
An Interview with Jonathan Papernick, Author of The Book of Stone
Jonathan Papernick’s debut novel, The Book of Stone, transports us to pre-9/11 Brooklyn to follow the course of Matthew Stone, a mentally unstable young man who loses a father and enters of a world of religious extremism. According to Dara…
Friday Feast: Breaking Up With Your Book, Writing for 21st Century Teens, Innovative Writers, Book Technology, and Why Some Authors Are Assholes
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. That’s the focus of the links this week, including changes to a common metaphor writers use to describe the writing process, depictions of 21st century teens in young adult books, storytelling methods of innovative authors, and the reading habits…
Surprise: You’re Writing a Series!
I never thought I’d write a series. After my first book came out I had a few people ask, “Will you write a sequel?” My look of horror might’ve been puzzling. My “God, no!” was less ambiguous. Don’t get me…