So you’re a writer. You’re creative, right? You’re multitalented, right? You’ve got loads of ideas spinning around that ol’ brain of yours, and you want to bring them all to fruition. Whether as short stories, poems, novels, or creative non-fiction, you’re a writer with a lot to offer, and it’s time to turn all those…
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Writing As Political Resistance
On March 24, 1933, the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic passed the Enabling Act, which gave the German Cabinet the ability to enact laws that bypassed the Reichstag, essentially conferring dictatorial power upon Adolf Hitler. On October 27, 1917, the October Revolution by the Bolshevik party established the Soviet government in Russia, a government that…
Read MoreOn Fantasy
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away… Just kidding, it was only twenty years and three thousand miles away. Hang on…that’s a suspiciously long way from my current location in the space-time continuum. Let’s try this again. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a young girl named Amira…
Read MoreWin A Free Copy Of THE SOWING!
This week, we’re running an Amazon giveaway of THE SOWING, the first book of the Seeds trilogy. All you have to do to enter is watch a short video of me and my sister Elena introducing ourselves and the characters in the books. It’s funny! (I think.) And fun! (I hope.) And it’s super easy…
Read MoreTHE HARVEST Release Day!
JOIN THE RESISTANCE! THE HARVEST, the third book in the Seeds trilogy, is officially available for download today. Available for download on Kindle or in paperback through Amazon. Remy Alexander wants revolution. After watching Vale fall back into the hands of the Sector, she will stop at nothing to reveal…
Read MoreThe Harvest Cover Reveal!
It’s been a long time coming, but the cover for THE HARVEST, the third book in the SEEDS trilogy, is finally here! For those of you interested in the process of book design, here are some notes about our process: This cover was possibly the hardest one we’ve done so far from a design perspective. We…
Read MoreWriter’s Digest Conference 2015: A Reflection
This past weekend I attended the 2015 Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City. It was only the second writing conference I’ve ever attended, and far larger in size and scale than the first. There were maybe four times as many agents and editors as there were at the first one I went to (the Missouri Writer’s…
Read MoreBook Review: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
It’s been a long time since I read a science fiction novel–hell, any novel–that disturbed me in quite the way Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly did. Forget science fiction. This is literature. This is one of those books that proves that genre fiction can be as real, hard-hitting, and thought-provoking as literary fiction, any day of…
Read MoreHow I Sold My First 10,000 Books
It’s been a crazy year and a half for one Amira K. Makansi. Since I began my journey as an author and a publisher in July of 2013, my co-authors and I have released two books and a novella, all set in the world of Okaria, a futuristic post-apocalyptic civilization. In early April we announced…
Read MoreIn The Language Of Dreams: Why Genre Fiction Deserves To Be Considered Great Literature
Pretension exists everywhere, but sometimes I think nowhere more than in literature. How many of us read The Grapes of Wrath in high school? How about The Great Gatsby? Or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter? But, let’s be real: who ever assigned The Lord Of The Rings to a high school curriculum? Or what about Dune, Frank…
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The Z-Axis 