Welcome Ziggy Schutz to the blog! Ziggy’s latest novella, Twice-Spent Comet is out now and it is absolutely beautiful. Such a heartwarming story of found family and romantic love. The structure is so well-done with snippets of an omniscient narrator at the beginning of each chapter introducing elements of the story. There is a big Read More …
Welcome Kat Hausler, author of What I Know About July: Writers usually have a lot to say. Otherwise, we wouldn’t fill up whole manuscripts. Somehow, though, the moment someone asks what your book is about, you may find yourself floundering for ideas, wishing you had the back cover so you could hastily plagiarize from the Read More …
Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert is an absolute gem of a story about a mother and daughter involved in witchcraft. I had been having a hard time getting into a book lately, but this one kept me turning pages from the start. Albert’s storytelling is smooth and flawless, and her characters were fun to Read More …
Dark Park is Kathe Koja’s follow-up to her novel Dark Factory which was out last year. Dark Factory was an absolute trip, of the good kind. A near future story of a group of characters who are involved in the club scene and discover (or maybe set loose) an energy at a rooftop rave that Read More …
By T. Kent Balo asked Carla to move in three times before she finally caved. They were curled up on his couch watching a Golden Girls rerun—Balo was obsessed with eighties sitcoms—when he raised the subject again. “Come on baby, we can make this work. I need you. Just think, you won’t have to lug Read More …
by J. Ashley-Smith I moved to Australia in the early 2000s, just after I turned thirty. It was a turning point in my life as significant and mind-blowing as the birth of our first child a few years later. The landscape just sucked me in, that vastness, its untameable nature. That wild heart, and the Read More …
Picture me in a rocking chair in the attic, sipping tea from a cracked mug, surrounded by decrepit mannequins with spider clusters for eyes. Shadows jig merrily on the walls. As I sip the ectoplasmic tea, I experience the memories of ghosts, but I won’t let that distract me. I have a job to do. Read More …
I am resistant to the idea that a writer’s work must be autobiographical in some way, that their characters and stories are conduits for the author’s personality or desires rather than invented fiction. Amidst the excitement of promoting my newest book, I must admit to some dread that I’ll get questions asking me if I’ve Read More …
As a huge fan of An Unkindness of Ghosts, I was very excited to dig into this one by the same author, Rivers Solomon. This one was immediately addictive with a main character, Vern, who escapes a cult-like community into the woods to have and raise her babies. There was so much to love in Read More …
By Steve Simpson Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try. —Homer Simpson I don’t find writing clearly easy, so I invented these self-serving reasons to do the opposite. Impenetrable words allow the reader to focus on the prosody This applies to poetry and prose. Here is an example Read More …