Category: The Craft
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Stealth Muse
Sometime while I wasn’t looking my muse climbed in an unguarded window and set up shop in his old office. The nerve of this guy, right? Gone for a year and a half then sneaks onto the job site and pretends like he’s been here all along. If he thinks for one minute that I’m…
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The Art of Writing Scary Characters
Being a horror author, I often hear questions about how I can write such scary stories and where that inspiration comes from. The most interesting thing is readers often don’t realize that it isn’t just the story that gets them scared but the evil characters. For me, both as an author and even more as…
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The Art of Horror
Hello, fellow scream-lovers. My name is Brian, and I’m the new kid on the block. Jack is my grandpa and Venus is my little sister and partner in crime. I used to draw when I was in school and have started to get back into it; my grandpa said that I might find a welcome…
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Don’t Know Science
What do you do when you love science fiction, want to write science fiction, but don’t have a degree in any science? What do you do when you’re not the typical geek who loves nerdy stuff but never had the focus to get through college? Or struggled with a learning disability that killed that dream?…
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Life on the Flip Side
The recent passing of Jimmy Buffett – the Father of Trop Rock (and of ‘Gulf & Western’ music, as he once labeled his style in his pre-Caribbean days) – got me thinking about connections among the arts, and how one form of art can inspire another. As Negatrite said a while back, most people probably…
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The Agent
At last, we arrive at the fourth face on my personal Mount Rushmore, and that face belongs to one Mr. Evan Marshall. Unlike the previous three luminaries, Mr. Marshall is not known to me as an author of fiction, though he has written some murder mysteries that I owe it to myself to investigate; see…
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What I Learned In The Pool (Of Blood)
Hey there! Hello from the wily lands of the splatterpunk subgenre. SO ripe, so fresh, so little known or understood. While I know many find this sub to be less than lovelerly, I, as a punk fiction indie author, am determined to write tales in all the punks. So splatterpunk and I had to find…
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Horrotica for Prudes
There’s been a lot of discourse on gore of late in this blog, but not much about sex. Maybe that’s because it’s a ‘touchy’ subject (pun intended)? It certainly appears to be so in the world of book marketing, in my experience, and that’s what I’m taking exception to today. To my knowledge, there’s really…
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The Bouncer
Welcome back to my series on the writers who most influenced my style. Today I’m going to discuss the third face on my personal Mount Rushmore, R.A. (Robert) Salvatore. Robert writes the Drizzt Do’Urden saga, a series of 53 novels written between 1988 and today. Two of them are spin-offs focusing on minor characters met…
Threads that Bind 