Vampires are Abroad
Congratulations to Stella Fosse on the publication of her new novel Vampires of a Certain Age. Widely available from independent bookstores (try Bookshop.org for delivery anywhere) and on all electronic platforms. Reviews are always welcome!
Romance: Top Selling Genre
Jody Savage, author of Brilliant Charming Bastard: The Best Revenge is Getting Rich, introduced us to Romance, the highly structured yet creative, best-selling genre. She emphasized that Romance is about relationships far more than exoticism. The genre is character-driven—in contrast to say thrillers—and always begins with conflicts, both within the main characters and between them. […]
Nancy Williard
WMO: Why do you write? NW: I remember sitting in a treehouse at ten singing songs and telling myself stories. I cannot remember not writing. WMO: What themes and ideas do you like to explore? NW: I seem to write a lot about trauma. In my fiction I often have young “coming of age” […]
Why, oh why, was my manuscript rejected?
Last month’s Slush Pile was another inspiring, interesting, and informative session, filled with praise for work well done and suggestions to make work better. Noah Stetzer (Associate Director, Bull City Press), Tracy Crow (Tracy Crow Literary Agency), and Ty Stumpf (Poet and Humanities Chair, Central Carolina Community College), would have continued to read many […]
Jody Savage
WMO: Why do you write? JS: When I was a kid, I read an interview with Ray Bradbury where he said the books in the library were his family and he wanted to join them on the shelf. That resonated with me. Not to write and publish books seems inconceivable—although as life worked out, […]
Writing Is An Adventure
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) began in 1999 as a way to encourage twenty-one would-be novel writers to complete a manuscript in a month’s time. Fifty thousand words was set as the goal because Chris Baty, the founder, determined that was the length of the shortest novel on his bookshelf—Huxley’s Brave New Word. NaNoAriMO quickly […]
Congratulations, Sandra!
Sandra Fisher’s “Fine” won our 2021 One-Syllable Ulta Flash Fiction contest. To read her story, click on the Ultra Flash Fiction heading, above.
2021 One Syllable Winner: “Fine” by Sandra Fischer
The call she knew would come came. He’s gone, they said. Died in his sleep. Tears fell, some for joy that he was free. She could let him go at last. In a sense, he’d been gone for six long years since they first heard why his speech was mixed and strange. The words […]
Ekphratic Writing: Ways to Generate Poems and Short Fiction
Ekphrasis: One artist looking at the art of another and finding inspiration through reflection. When looking at art, we can record what we see in the work either literally or metaphorically. We can record how the art makes us think or feel about the world or about ourselves. We can record information about the […]
Examples of Ekphratic Writing
The Big Push By John Glenday after Sir Herbert James Gunn ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme’ Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’. His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding from the ears. The Boche are all […]