John guest posts about writing memorable fiction on ReidWrite

Luc Reid is the author of, among other things, Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures.  He is also the lizard king of Codex, which he started and of which I’m so happy to be a member. He’s always starting provocative threads on Codex, making us all think and reexamine the principles of story and the whole writing business. He

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I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells

You can scare the crap out of me (Aracnaphobia), and I will love you forever. You can make me bite my nails in terrible suspense (Wait Until Dark, The Village) or throw supernatural at me (Poltergeist) and I will sing with praise. But the moment you do gruesome, the moment you start showing me entrails and organs,

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John guests on Writing Excuses season 3 episode 16

A while ago the Writing Excuses team asked me to record with them, and last Friday I got to do it and had a blast. We recorded three episodes. In the first podcast we talk about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. As usual,

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“From the Clay of His Heart” reprinted

I loves me golem story. It was such a joy to write. Obviously, two editors found it a joy to read as well. So it was just reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 9 edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and published by Tor.com. The good thing is that there is a whole boatload of other

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Camille Paglia, Word Ninja

I think I must disagree with half of everything Paglia says (I’m a Republican, she’s a Democrat). But when you can write like a kung fu master, you have to be read: Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet

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