This is a guest post by Kevin Weitzel. In September of 2008, Scholastic had no idea that what they had just released would become a worldwide phenomenon. Since then, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has been recognized as a global sensation that’s changed the lives of millions. Hitting the New York Times Bestselling Lists…
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What’s The Deal With Genres?
Genres are incredibly important things. The best books, of course, will transcend genres – I think of my favorites Catch-22 or the Brothers Karamazov when I think of books that transcend genres and become simply ‘great books’. But when we as writers or publishers are in the process of writing and marketing our works, it’s…
Read MoreWriting As A Team: Collaborative Fiction Writing
This is a re-post from the Alliance of Independent Authors website, for which I contributed an article about writing my debut novel with my mother and sister. Over the last year and a half, a mother and two daughters have written a novel together, collaboratively, in an almost entirely egalitarian fashion. “Somehow all three of…
Read MoreSymbols Are Power
I remember spending an inordinate amount of time in my freshman year high school class discussing symbolism. “But what does the albatross symbolize?” we were asked about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “But what does the snake represent?” we were asked about D.H. Lawrence’s famous poem. “But what does Antigone’s burial ceremony mean?” At the time, I…
Read MoreDystopia On Demand
This is a guest post by Kurt McCrohan. Execution by combat, globally spread degenerative disease, and a bleak, desolate landscape challenging human survival. Sounds familiar, and there’s a reason for that. These are but a few examples of the themes which have been dominating the most recent popular films and novels, and while they are…
Read MoreWhy We’re Serializing, Part 1
A lot of people have been asking why my co-authors and I decided to publish serially. In the age of Amazon, instant gratification, and the digital revolution, why would someone choose to release a book in installments rather than the full thing? We’ve even had a few people ask ‘what is serialization?’ and many more have…
Read MoreLaw of Conservation – A Short Work Of Fiction
Green. Red. Pop. The echoes hiss down upon us distantly like a noise underwater, or from far away. I sit in a crowd of hundreds of people, children and adults, squealing, pointing, shouting at the sky. Green, blue, white, pop, pop, pop. The height they will reach is equal to the initial velocity times time…
Read MoreFive Ways To Stay Sane As A Writer – Guest Post By Jamie Krakover
Let’s face it, writers are a crazy bunch. We listen to the voices in our heads, research crazy things on Google (waves to the CIA), and would rather spend hours with people who don’t really exist in places that only come from our deepest imaginations. But when the rest of the world sometimes looks at…
Read MoreA Word On Words – Guest Post By Ken Floro, III
Writers collect vocabulary words like tourists collect souvenirs, and believe it or not, words can serve the same purpose. I still remember the first time I encountered evocative words like ‘senescence’, ‘hoary’, and ‘sanguine’. Somehow they struck a chord in me, and I immediately knew I wanted to add them to my collection. When I…
Read MoreBook Review: “Our Held Animal Breath” by Kathryn Kirkpatrick
I have a deep and abiding respect for poets. Poetry, I think, is among the hardest of art forms to do well; it requires a painter’s skill with imagery and visualization, a musician’s sense of rhythm and beat, a writer’s craft with words and metaphors, and a philosopher’s or a monk’s contemplative view of the…
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The Z-Axis 