Join me as editor of the anthology and contributors E.S. Magill, Jean Graham, Aaron Smith, Richard W. Goldsmith, and Billy San Juan at this festive pre-Halloween Launch Party to celebrate the publication of California Screamin’. Come early for champagne, cake, and other holiday goodies. Anthology contributors will discuss the anthology and read spell-binding snippets of…
California Screamin’ California. Close your eyes and say it: California. Images of perpetual sunshine, swaying palm trees, and blue waters lapping at sandy beaches. That one word conjures visions of gold and fame, luring dreamers to its mythic shores. The original peoples lived in an abundant paradise. The Spanish found a familiarity to their homeland.…
Stephen King’s novel, Carrie, is an epistolary novel whose form has the tendency to confuse and disorient the reader. While King’s book was quite popular and successful enough to warrant several film adaptations, it is a bit of a shallow representation of the female psyche, represented by the slew of bitchy teenage high school girls…
Forgotten (As Script Supervisor) In development by Bagboy Productions and Street Artist Pictures Set in a therapist’s office, a tormented man reluctantly opens up about his abandonment issues deriving from his Greek biological father, reflecting on his addictions, anger and near death experience. Based on true events. Winner: Best Experimental Short Best Experimental Short…
Should we consider linguistics and English composition when creating dialogue in fiction? How does syntax function within fictional dialogue and set a genre apart? In How English Works: A Lingusitic Introduction, Adams and Curzan state that we use “intuition” (169) to decipher the meanings of sentences and determine whether a sentence is structured correctly. For…
When writing a story, your goal is to paint such a vivid word picture that your readers will be able to see and experience everything on the page as they read it. Your goal, then, is to paint as many vivid images as possible. To do that, you have to describe settings, characters, sights, sounds,…
So, you’ve drawn up a complex character sheet, prepared a full outline with all the plot twists and surprise reveals, and have everything ready to write that future best-selling novel. But before you can write the clever opening line of your book, you have to decide on one important thing: the Point of View. Point…
The query letter is usually the first thing that is seen by an editor, and unless the query is polished and stands out above the rest of the slush pile, it may be the only thing seen before your letter is tossed to the “rejected” stack after the first paragraph. The opening of your letter sets…
So you’re finally finished writing it – the thing that has taken up all of your free time for the past two years (or more), the monkey on your back that wouldn’t let you sleep, that had you pulling out your pen and paper while on vacation with your family because The Idea came to…
Is it important for an author to tell the age of his characters? Or should you leave it up to the mind of the reader? Well, there are mixed answers on this, but for the most part I believe some indication of age should be given, especially in longer works such as novels. A writer…
