Where Crime, Horror, and Science Fiction Meet – Discussing new discoveries, old mysteries, creepy tales, and dark storytelling
As a member of an active and passionate writers group, I have participated in many a debate over many different writing related subjects. For example, I once told a guy to check out the book How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish. (And I’m telling all of you to go read it too.) On the…
Read more A Public Service Announcement: Do Not Kill Your Friends Over Poetry/Prose
Ah, welcome to Tuesday comrades. Time to see what we’ve accomplished this week. For me: It’s the week of almost-not-quite. 1. Almost finished a new short story. I’m up to the climatic, near-end scene. The story sorta wrote itself, which is always nice, right? But it still isn’t finished. Just two more scenes. 2. Worked…
Read more A Week of Almost-Not-Quite: A Tuesday Post of Accountability
In Fragile Things, a collection of short stories and poems by Neil Gaiman, there is a wonderful poem called “Instructions.” As Gaiman says in the introduction this poem is “Quite literally, a set of instructions for what to do when you find yourself in a fairy tale.” While he might not come out and say…
Great news! My buddy Ajay Ramachandran, who comments early and often on anything Virginia Woolf or P.G. Wodehouse (our very special mentors from earlier this year), has had a a wonderful poem publish by Midtown: A Journal of Writing and Fine Arts. “Achebe to Zwiren” Please go check it out – it’s well worth it.…
A lot of writers I know do multiple creative things: needlepoint, ceramics, jewelry making, theatre, art, dance, music. There’s a certain attractiveness to this. Because, always, creativity breeds creativity. Through experimentation people find what they want to say, and then, through even more creative exploration, discover the way to say it. Every now and then,…
Read more The Multi-Creatives: David Keplinger’s By and By: The Copybook Songs of Isaac P. Anderson
Haiku is defined in Jack Myers’s The Portable Poetry Workshop as: “A Japanese lyric form composed of three lines totaling 17 syllables: 5, 7, 5 respectively.” Well, if you ever want to understand the terminology of poetry, you can’t do much better than this book. If you want to know the definitions for anything from…
I have had the opportunity to take several poetry classes (and even succeeded in earning passing grades). In every one of the workshops that I’ve had in this genre, there’s always a person or two who says something along the lines of : “Poetry today is music.” Meaning that music lyrics are today’s version of old-school…
Read more The Difference Between Poetry and Lyrics: A Crash Course in One Way to Read Poetry
Okay, I found Brooke Axtell as a friend of a friend on Facebook. (You guys know how this goes, right?) Anyway, you guys have to check this out. It’s a link to her poetry. Sexy, risky, and, well, pretty. But the really cool bit is you have to hit the ‘listen’ section and hear her read.…
The verdict on Up From the Basement (the poetry book): You must read all of it and it works better. My UGWPers got a partial submission, namely the Bundy section of the poetry book. The result was that, well, it didn’t really work. The CWCers got the whole shebang and they said the things that…
You thought JePoWriMo was done because Mo stands for Month, right? Wrong. I’m still not quite finished with my serial killer poetry book. (That was my magical epiphany that I kept secret to surprise my CWCers.) It’s so cool! So the first part is about Edmund Kemper (also known as the Co-ed Killer), the second…
Other Worlds, and This 