The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a classic horror novella by H.P. Lovecraft. It tells the first-person story of a young man on break from college who travels to an isolated seaside New England village and discovers that it is run by a cult and most of the townsfolk are doomed to devolve into weird amphibious monstrosities […]
I launched my Patreon a little over 5 months ago, and it’s been steadily growing. Through it, my patrons receive: Monthly chats with professional authors, editors, and agents Weekly poems Weekly writing prompts Monthly short stories Monthly novel excerpts Monthly writing articles Monthly manuscript critiques I’m doing my best to provide a good value to […]
One of the things that impressed me most about Conrad’s novel about Charles Marlow’s nightmarish adventures in the Congo was the lushness of language. The atmospheric opening immediately struck me as exceptional: The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky […]
Fiction story ideas are all around us. It’s not a matter of finding them so much as just opening your eyes and seeing them. A story idea could come from a bit of overheard conversation, a photograph, a brief article in the newspaper, or an old family tale. Many horror and dark fantasy authors can find […]
Hi everyone! If you’ve been enjoying the writing articles and reviews I’ve been posting on my website, please consider supporting me at Patreon! The goal of my Patreon is to provide my readers with great content while enabling me to focus on the kind of work I’d most like to be spending my time on: […]
People have asked me about my experiences in Goddard College’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program, so I thought I would post about them. Hopefully this will help anyone thinking of pursuing his or her own MFA. I have been writing for publication for over 20 years. I started pursuing my writing […]
It’s pretty easy to confuse a braided novel with a fix-up novel. What’s the difference? A braided novel follows multiple viewpoint characters, each of whom has his or her own story, and the stories interweave and converge at or near the climax of the book. If the individual stories are strongly plotted and largely independent […]
A shared world anthology (also known as a shared universe anthology) is a type of themed anthology in which the writers create works – usually stories, but sometime poetry or sequential art – exploring the same fictional world. If the fictional world is already known in popular culture, the writers are also likely to use […]
A themed anthology is a book-length work containing short stories, essays or poetry all written by different authors on the same theme, concept or topic. Themed short story anthologies are very common, and make up the majority of anthologies from major publishers that readers find on bookstore shelves. Why are themed anthologies so popular? Themes […]
