The perpetual student

Fiction is a craft. A journey. I think we are all students of writing, because there is always something to learn. Through a lot of my posts I gave out a lot of tips and opinions, but I never stop learning either. I don’t think that any good writer stops learning. There are always ways [...]

Mourn for the journalists

The people on the other side of fiction, those guys, yeah, they haven’t been doing so well lately. In a way, you could say that the book publishing industry has been suffering a very slow death at the hands of Americans that are too lazy to read now. But the internet has called for the [...]

Writers and design

Through my tenure writing this blog, I’ve dug my way around the internet trying to find useful and interesting websites that I would think other writers would appreciate. The one thing I can never seem to get over though, is the horrible, amateur looking designs that many of them employ. I already picked on Pif [...]

Blast from the past

I wasn’t always a smarty-pants know-it-all when it came to fiction. No no. I went through plenty of stages of learning, most of them trial and error, to get to a point where I felt comfortable about talking about fiction with some slight authority. And that is why it gives me great pleasure to present [...]

So you think you’re funny?

There exists a plane on the internet where all things come together like a really complicated Megazord with autism. I’m of course talking about internet comedy. The lines of fiction and non-fiction are blurred considerably in the efforts of getting a laugh. I think it’s still worth mentioning here, because fiction does not always have [...]

Don’t be afraid of the workshop

One of the best ways to get valuable insight into your writing is to have it workshopped. I had the luxury of going through this during the creative writing classes I took in college. For those not in school, there are community book stores and book groups that will hold workshops. I’m sure there are [...]

Have you checked out…

…your local non-corporate bookstore? Many people go to Borders or Barnes & Nobles when they need a book. But there are plenty of private owned bookstores in every city that might offer more to it’s customers then just new releases and Starbucks. Many will have extensive used books sections, with way more manageable prices compared [...]