Category: craft

Y’all been hearing the same thing I have? That we’re kind of easing into a novella-friendly space? Like:

• http://io9.gizmodo.com/tor-com-explains-why-novellas-are-the-future-of-publish-1685440234
• http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/business/media/james-patterson-has-a-big-plan-for-small-books.html?

And more and more, I’m sure. As for what constitutes a novella, a short novel, a novelette, a long story . . . who knows. I mean: ed…

Which is a slasher I wrote  . . . two years ago? I’d just reread The Virgin Suicides, and thought, Man, that was cool, sure—along with American Psycho, maybe the book of the nineties—but, wouldn’t it be cooler if that royal first-person delivery could be used to deliver something with a lot of people dying in gruesome ways? So: Lake Access Only. Which turned out cool. At least, I verymuch dig it. Yet to sub it anywhere, though, as it’s a weird one. Also? I may di…

Figured I’d archive the posters/banners each place makes, and slip the link in so’s they don’t get just completely lost. Will embed when embedding’s a thing, too:

TIH 092: Stephen Graham Jones on Werewolves, Mongrels and Common Writing Mistakes

Check out the “Show Notes” on that click, too. Most places? They don’t give you a cheat sheet. Also available on YouTube:

And here’s the part II of that:

TIH 094: Stephen Graham J

First among them would be Don’t adopt antiquated speech patterns and/or diction for your subject lines, unless you’re Cormac McCarthy. But even he (He) doesn’t use “ye”—which, correct me if I’m wrong, but nobody did, right? It was just a tyopgraphic/typesetting shortcut, which still  got a proper “the” when read off the page.

Anyway, searching for a different email, I stumbled on this/below: Chizine hit me up for te…

I read this first at Isleta Casino in Albequerque. Not just randomly, mongst the slots, but for a keynote-thing. Why I wrote a commencement address for that, no idea. Then Jon Davis (there at Isleta) asked me to read it for his MFA students at IAIA (click around, there’s also a chapter of Mongrels out-loud, first-time ever, and likely the only time I’ll read that chapter in front of people), said he’d post it for all, and he wasn’t lying:

Because I kind of insist on assigning amazing stuff for my grad workshops, I of course assigned Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Skullcrack City (my original write-up here). It was dug by all. Here’s JRJ’s answers to the questions we crowd-sourced:

—To start with the ending: Is this bleak or is it hopeful? Are they (that is, ‘we’) winning? What others ending were under consideration, if any, or did you have this as your get-to point the whole time?

This was always my …

Those are the three letters I’ve been tagging onto the end of each writing session since forever. Everybody do this? I can’t not do it. Just a way a laying claim to the blank page, like. Same way you leave your jacket on the seat in the theater, saying you’ll be right back, that this stands for you, that you’re not leaving, you’re going to finish this thing. However, after a while I did learn to teach each of my Pages or Words or WordPerfects or whatev…

Not a ‘new’ book . . . yet. Just a book I’m writing right now. May never even finish it, who knows. As for when I started—tab, tab, tab—it looks like:

And, not really keeping this as journal of this book or anything. I have done that once, with “Where the Camopede Roam,” but that was just a seventy-two hour commitment. This has already taken longer than that.

Why I’m doing this, it’s . . . you know how when you teach fiction writing, you&…

I wrote Not for Nothing right on the heels of a second read of Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. And that read was because the movie showed up on some ninety-nine cent shelf, to remind me, to impress me, to lure me. And I’ve been telling anybody who asked that that was probably right around 2006 — I was pretty sure Not for Nothing was the last novel I wrote before Flushboy, in 2007. Just looked at the timestamps on the old files, though, and:

And that’s kind of foreve…

I’m pretty sure the first rashomon I ever saw, at least the first where the on-the-fly construction of the story really set me back on my heels, was this one:

After that I was hooked. Completely. Forever. Happily. Now I keep a running list of rashomon stuff, which I’ll annotate below some. But it also strikes me that every single first-person story is basically being told as ‘counter’ to the version that ‘really’ happened. Yes? Or under…