Dear Heroes, I want to start by saying thank you. Thank you for being there for me when I was a child with little else to find comfort in. When I was sick and stuck in bed, we passed through…
Guest Post: To Find the Time to Write by Eric Rasmussen
Let’s all imagine a nice middle-America gal named Laura. Laura likes colorful sweaters, loves her daughters, and feels ambivalent about her job, maybe as a nutritionist. Plenty of things bring Laura joy: homemade marinara sauce, suggestive text messages from her…
Writing that is Alive by Ron Clinton Smith
“If you bore yourself, you bore others,” a comedian friend told me years ago. It was true of the very off the wall stand up we were doing at the time, and I’ve lived by it both as a writer…
Guest Post: Wrestling with the Headlines by Sidney Williams
I once pointed a creative writing student in search of mystery story ideas to a Twitter feed that aggregates crime news from across the country. “That’s going to depress me all day,” he said. That wasn’t my intent of course….
Guest Post: Out of Time by Beth Sherman
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything. – John Irving We must use time creatively. – Martin…
Guest Post: The Importance of Being a Bookworm by Katie Schwartz
Like a lot of people who scribble in notebooks constantly and wear their library cards thin, my early childhood was defined by books. There were books in every room at my grandparents’ house, where I lived until I was six….
Choosing Settings for Your Writing by Christa Carmen
Think of the last place you visited that really stuck out to you. What was it about the locale that made you connect to the experience? What details of the place did you retain and recall at later, unexpected moments,…
Guest Post: The Quarrel by Debra Young
It never fails. I sit down to write and the blue screen of death flares up in my head, the gears grind to a halt and it’s quiet up there, but for the voice, irritable and argumentative. What? You want…
Guest Post: MFA Myopia: The Pain is in the Details by Elizabeth Mastrangelo
I’ve always had trouble stepping back and seeing the big picture. “Well, no wonder you’re struggling,” my tenth-grade U.S. History teacher said when we met about my failing grade. “You’ve underlined every single sentence in this textbook. You don’t know…
Plot: How to Drive Your Story with Impossible Situations by Betty Krasnik
In order to write a good plot, you need to take big risks. Often times when we write, we fall into the usual patterns of building suspense. We are not being unique in our choices, because in that moment, we…
Guest Post: Dishwater and Death: The Writer’s Promise by Willow Becker
I’ve been a hobby writer since I was 5 years old. It was never a goal to make writing my living. I wanted to be an actress, an FBI agent, a witch. Writing is something I picked up along the…
A Conversation with C.S.E. Cooney
An interview by Alicia Cole. C. S. E. Cooney (csecooney.com/@csecooney) is an audiobook narrator, singer/songwriter, and author of World Fantasy Award Winner Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium 2015). Her work includes the Dark Breakers series, Jack o’ the Hills, The Witch…