I was scrolling trough my Kindle Highlights (you know you can see all your highlighted passages from Kindle books online, right?) when I came across the following highlights from The Exorcist. I don't remember highlighting anything from it but I read it at the beginning of the year so maybe that's normal. Horror has a … Continue reading Adventures in Unexpected Great Prose – The Exorcist
Nick Mamatas wrote a post on Facebook today about how writers can go about finding an agent. As someone who will hopefully start shopping a book around soon, this was a godsend. Straightforward, no nonsense. With Mr. Mamatas's permission, here is the post as he wrote it. This is *one* method of finding a literary … Continue reading Nick Mamatas’s Simple Guide to Finding a Literary Agent
I'm writing again. The following is a single-sentence paragraph that I think works, mainly due to the emotions involved. Let me know in the comments (no worries, this is first-draft material, so be brutally honest). The argument was mundane, a been-married-for-twelve-years banal tiff, a clichéd and overused disagreement between people who love each other, love … Continue reading Just a few words
Here's Max Booth III's Isaac, the main character in the book The Nightly Disease, to tell us. "This is my take on it. Hotels are the kind of places you don’t mind bringing your family to—you can expect good service, a nice breakfast. Motels, on the other hand, are where people take cheap dates for … Continue reading What’s The Difference Between a Hotel and a Motel?
Eileen is a well-written and strange little book, that is hard to recommend. But stay with me. It's slow. Fully three fourths of the book are just a few days in the life of Eileen, a rather odd young woman with no ambition and a social recluse by choice. She just goes to work at … Continue reading Eileen – Book Review
The following is a short excerpt from Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway that should be enough to either convince to buy the book right away because wow! The book tells the story of a group of teenagers that are trying to adapt to life after living in portal worlds (like the Narnia kids or Dorothy … Continue reading Just a Bit of Great Writing
I saw the following on Toni Morrison's Facebook page. She's explaining where she finds time to write. "Very, very early in the morning, before they got up. I'm not very good at night. I don't generate much. But I'm a very early riser, so I did that, and I did it on weekends. In the … Continue reading Toni Morrison on Finding Time to Write
Do you ever read books simply for the prose? In an attempt to improve my writing I do this a fair bit and am now reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. It was there I came across the following description that, as it happens, is also the best written thing I've read all … Continue reading The Best Writing of the Week – Tender is the Night
You should have read one of Ken Liu's stories by now. You really should. Ken Liu is one of the brightest new stars of the science fiction and fantasy fields. He's won all the awards and had stories in all the main magazines, often reprinted in "Best of" anthologies. So yeah, you should really have … Continue reading The Paper Menagerie – Book review
Here's a short story I wrote in about 15 minutes at a drink-and-write event that Willona Sloan held at last year's Reykjavik Literature Festival. This is what 7 years of writing practice gets you. Enjoy. Windowsill Cowboy Thomas sat on his favorite windowsill in the living room and looked out at the sun set over the … Continue reading Windowsill Cowboy – Short Story
