Building a Book Playlist by Rob Hart
One of the first things I do when I write a book is make a playlist. I’ve got three rules: It can’t have too many songs—I like to keep it to roughly an hour’s worth of music. Only one song per musician or artist. And none of the songs can have been used in a […]
From The Atari Times to The Throes of Crime by Erik Arneson
One of my earliest memories of school is writing a short story about King Kong and how proud Mom was when I brought it home. (I wish I remembered more about the actual story — I’m certain it would have made a worthy sequel to the original film.) A few years later, I wrote a […]
Yes, Exactly Like That by Mike McCrary
What’s your book about? Silence. Pause. You start. You stop. You start again. You fumble around your marble mouth. Your tongue all of a sudden weighs twenty pounds. You then say some canned crap that sounds a lot like canned crap. This is the drill when I’m sometimes asked about my books. Keep in mind […]
The Fine Art of Killing Your Darlings by Nick Kolakowski
“All writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.” – Martin Amis, “The War Against Cliché” Some things take a few minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. Games like chess, for instance, or knocking off a bank and getting […]