Storytellersunplugged

1 I started Twittering a few days ago. For those of you who don’t know (or care) what Twitter is – www.twitter.com -- it’s basically a way of microblogging from your mobile device. You can draw the attention of your ‘followers’ to a news item on Darfur or pose a Zen riddle or set up an impromptu meeting at the local Starbucks or hype some cool new person or service. You could also announce your arrival at Taco Bell ... Read More

--Justine Musk So here’s the thing. I sat down yesterday to write my essay for this site. I had a topic. I had a sense of where the piece would start, where it would end up, and how it might go in-between. But when it came game-time, I realized: I got nuthin’. Could be I’m a bit burned-out – and maybe I could have essayed about that, except Elizabeth Bear already said everything I would want to say about that point in your ... Read More

By Richard Steinberg This month’s column is dedicated to the sacrifices of Capt. Benjamin D. Tiffner, 31, of West Virginia; 5th Special Forces Group and Staff Sgt. Patrick F. Kutschbach, 25, of Pennsylvania; 10th Special Forces Group. Thank you guys, stand easy. “I've been struggling with this toast for several weeks. Should I strike a melancholy, time passes sort of tone? A humorous, light hearted thing? Maybe stentorian wisdom seasoned with a soupcon of slightly controlled emotion? But instead of such frippery, I decided on ... Read More

By Justine Musk 1 One of the most common questions people ask me about writing – other than “where do you get your ideas” (or, as my mother-in-law once put it, “How does a nice trophy wife like you come up with stuff like this?” I assume she was joking, or at least half-joking, because that question still cracks me up, although when I share it with others they tend to look slightly horrified ) – is “Do you outline?” And one of ... Read More

By Justine Musk (**Note from the "management**) This column was supposed to appear last month. It never made it from the overseas Kiosk to US e-mail, but we bring it to you now as Stan has company this weekend…flexibility is good. Justine wanted me to leave in the happy birthday to Skipp, but notes it's over man…better late than never… …..DNW) (Happy Birthday John Skipp! Seems like just yesterday I was an impressionable young slip of a thing first discovering Splatterpunk….) In ... Read More

Justine Musk 1 People who live in mostly-glass houses rarely throw stones. They’re not that stupid. They do, however, have to deal with the small corpses of birds who fly into the windows. There is a lesson in this, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. 2 I read once that there are two kinds of readers. The first, and most common, is the bright, well-adjusted child with decent social skills who absorbs reading from his or her environment. There are many books ... Read More

(so what the hell do I do now?) Justine Musk 1 Perhaps theme gets a bad rap. Its twin, Theme with a capital T, deserves all the potshots and ridicule and dressing-down that it gets. But if Theme is the pretentious dude decked out in Gucci and Prada who wears sunglasses at night and brags about how many thousands of dollars he dropped at his VIP table at Hyde or Les Deux the other night -- which was a worknight because only wage slave losers ... Read More

Justine Musk 1 So I was thinking a bit about serial killers. We love our serial killers – in movies and fiction. So much so that readers like me have been known to pick up a paperback on the New Releases table, groan, “Not another serial killer novel,” and toss it back. But I imagine that serial killers are like vampires: just when you think the genre has been done to death (no pun intended), someone comes and reinvents it, makes it hot all ... Read More

by Justine Musk 1 You get attached to your characters. You spend a great deal of time getting to know them. I know I ‘have’ a character – I’m writing him or her in a way that feels vivid for the reader (some readers) -- when I have a sense of his or her ‘mindset’ – a perspective, a mental outfit of that character’s knowledge, beliefs and experience I can slip into as soon as I tap out that name on my computer screen. Some mindsets ... Read More