Category: craft

Man, if everybody doesn’t have a list, right? I’d guess, if I took the time to look, somebody’s already got one like this, I mean: things they’re tired enough of in horror to make a public plea that those things stop, lest the whole genre cave in or something. Or, really, those things we get tired of in our chosen reading areas (assuming we use the marketing terms [Western, Horror, Romance, Thriller, Mystery, Erotica, Historical, ‘Literary,&…

For a long time now I’ve gone to bed early

For a long time now I’ve been writing “title shot” in the back of every book I read, along with a/the page number. Most, anyway. All it means is that this (page) is the first time the title of the book appears in the book itself. Just something I’ve been tracking for years and years, with the idea of going back someday, synthesing all the ratios (“if a title’s to appear in a book, it’s usual…

Editor Y:

In today’s trend-oriented publishing climate, you need to either be the celebrity-of-the-moment or you need to have a bulletproof plan to plug into what’s hot, what’s guaranteed, what there’s already an audience for. And, sir/madam/etc., that you don’t already know my name from the tabloids should suggest that, while not infamous for killing or raping or stalking somebody, which is pretty much the standard for literary poten

Was reading over a novel I’m about to submit, and kind of just mentally ticking off the things I was going to be writing ‘stet’ by after the copy editor and proofreader have had a go at it (assuming a lot here, I know, but hope springs, all that), so figured it’d maybe just be easier to go ahead and rig up a document-type affair beforehand. Or at least a list — things I always do, things to watch for, things to let slide:…

quickest of quick notes: new essay up at The Cult. On revision, of all unlikely things. I mean, of all unlikely things for me to be writing about. Anyway, it’s here.

and, nope, no new DEMON THEORY news in the last few, sweltering, basketball-playing, story-workshopping, dog-tying-up-only-to-have-it-chew-through-the-rope, Daily Show watching hours.…

and Dana Scully for surgeon general, yeah. really though, just here to post a cleaner version of that Demon Theory banner:

really, though, what all this banner-stuff has put me in mind of is revision. or, I should say, “Revision.” that which I never teach but always say is a pret…

Maybe it’s this way for everybody, I don’t know. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something in a book, anyway, and it’ll just burrow right to the core of me and never leaves. I say sometimes, but, I suppose, I’m only about to list three. And, it’s not that they’re said all that perfect or anything, it’s more like they’re just obviously true. Trick was, I’d just never thought about them:

• ‘Everybody has a ce

read enough stuff, you can’t help but start keeping lists. this is mine:

https://www.demontheory.net/wp-admin/excl/manifesto.swf

[ it’s a link now, because I made this with Flash, like 76 years ago, and Flash is tricky to embed in this WordPress that Flash never even dreamed of . . . ]

I’ll probably keep adding to it, yeah. one thing I see now that I forgot to put on there was that oftentimes the writer will be including what seems like gratuitous sexR…