Storytellersunplugged

My wife won't mind. I'm sure she'll let me tell you . . . A few minutes ago, I was sitting at the keyboard mulling my next blog on this site. With a pressing deadline for my ninth novel, my mind is a blur, but I was committed to coming up with something. In walks my wife. She's truly one of the sweetest people I know. Oh, she can be a scrapper--don't get me wrong. But she has a ... Read More

Our own Richard Steinberg is swapping in for Janet Berliner this month with the following essay - DNW "Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond the pain," Saint Bartholomew That's my job. Making you feel all you are beyond the pain. But you can not move beyond the pain, until you've felt it. I know ... Read More

-- Bev Vincent I have published something on the order of fifty short stories since I began writing seriously at the beginning of the millennium. Some of the early stories appeared in what are disparagingly referred to as “for the love” (or “4theLuv”) markets. A few were published in “royalty only” anthologies (which are but a smidgen better than 4theLuv markets in that in rare cases some of them have delivered a pittance in revenue—my current record is about $18). Most of ... Read More

YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS!   The title of my entry today has been shamelessly stolen from a book called (what else?) YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS. Edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, it's published by Harper Perennial, and is subtitled CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WRITERS INTRODUCE STORIES THAT HELD THEM IN AWE.  You probably already have a pretty good idea of what the work offers, but Donna Seaman's BOOKLIST review will give you the details:  Writers are passionate readers because literature is an ongoing dialogue. And ... Read More

(AND THE WALLS COME A-TUMBLIN’ DOWN) By John Skipp Dear class – Today, I thought it might be nice to slap the living shit out of some stupid ideas that have annoyed me for years, and hobbled us far too long. They’re the same stupid ideas that Dave Wilson and the Tems grappled with, in their very smart essays that led off the month here at good ol’ SU. And they function like the sand bags on the ballet dancers in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic short story, ... Read More

The people attended the funeral, and toasted sombre flutes, when the King of Bad Days choked to death on a Calamity Fruit. As everyone knows, the calamity fruit grows, on the Tortured Wallow Tree, in the Orchards of Misery. They are the succulent source of all ill fortune, when chewed and spat into a magical spittoon. The old King was popular, giving a bad day once a moon, or if a person was naughty, then maybe two. But the new King, ... Read More

With my first Rogue Angel novel, THE LOST TOMB, due in just a few days, I haven't had time to put together a column for this month. Instead, I'm going to share one of the few short fiction pieces I've done during my career. (It takes my longer to write a short story than it does a novel, so I don't do all that many of them.) "Roadside Memorials" was written for the Roc anthology, LOST ON THE DARKSIDE, which came ... Read More

by John B. Rosenman Before we begin, here are two quotes from an article that presents the whole subject of book reviews from a somber perspective. Newspaper book reviews don’t make money.  Ever.  Anywhere.  And they are dying like polar bears in the Artic. . . . Publishers don’t appear to believe that newspaper ads can sell books.  Well, not ads in book review sections, which studies have found to be the least-read section of the Sunday newspaper.        – Steve Carper, “Writer’s Bloc – The ... Read More

Get the podcast - or Subscrbe in iTunes If I do this right, this post will be exactly 500 words (not counting the title). Why? Because it shouldn’t take more than that to discuss (not “talk about”) flash fiction, the class of stories shorter than X words (where X could be 1000, 500, 250…). For example: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. This six-word “story,” penned by Ernest Hemingway, never a garrulous writer to begin with, is often cited as the ne plus ultra ... Read More

by Gerard Houarner Another in an occasional series of over-intellectualized approaches to writing which, at worst, will send you screaming into the internet abyss after the first paragraph or, if you get through a few lines, may remind you or jog into place a more coherent version of the notion you've had all along. I'm not promising anything, I'm just throwing a bunch of suff out there.... Filters. This is what you could call what folks, and characters, use to include and exclude information about themselves and ... Read More