Blogs on the literary-related, like you might find in an English class–a good one, I hope.

CREATIVE WRITING 101

• The All-Important Character (about writing to learn about writing, and the importance of characters)
• Novel ou Novella? (how to categorize your literary work, and why you should let readers know the word count)
• They’ve Got It Covered (thinking of your cover art as part of the artistic whole)
• How To Write What You Don’t Know (blasting the old advice of “write what you know” out of the water. What else would an imagination be for?)
• What’s So Bad About Generalizations? (on how we need generalizations–and love them!–as writers)
• What’s So Free About This Speech? (about the dangers of a narrowing freedom of speech, and public castigation)
• Seasonal Affective Writing Disorder (how the weather, and our other circumstances, affect our writing)
• I Am Not Alone (pointing you to an article on how not to write a novel, and my two cents on whether or not you should write to your audience)
• More Writing Lessons from Normal Life (about cutting word count as a final-final edit and a beautifying, clarifying tool)
• The Literary Type (on the division of writing laborers and how we are not as different as we think we are. Lighten up, everyone)
• Writer’s Fatigue (and how I don’t believe in writer’s block)
• More Writing Lessons from Normal Life (learning the lesson of cutting–killing your darlings–from my little darling)

LITERATURE 101

• Hero Tales (on a conversation I had with my four-year-old about superheroes and then a researched discussion of hero types)
• Weird for Weird’s Sake (about defining art based on its strangeness… or not)
• POV and Other Narrative Modes (a primer on point of view, voice, etc.; why present tense might not work)
• Era of the Villain (we are living in the era of the entirely sympathetic villain)
• Novel ou Novella? (the difference (or not) between novels and novellas, and many other literary forms)
• YA Vs MG (the difference (and gradations) between Middle Grades and Young Adult fiction)
• Tribute to a Magical Realism Giant (a bit of biography following the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
• Tribute to a Giant of Voice (a biography and personal aspirations following the death of Maya Angelou)
• The New Narrative Mode (about how changing perspective in literature is NOT changing POV, how POV is NOT Voice, and how I coined a new term to enlighten us all)
• The Collective Imagination (making my claim that I am not about to copy, and nothing is new under the story sun)
• The Bad Comma (for when you thought writing ability and grammar ability were the same thing)
• Magical Realism, Discussed and Listed (what is magical realism and what are some books I can read in the genre?)
• What Do You Do When You’re Stuck on a Book? (what to do when you just can’t seem to want to keep reading a book)
• My Apologies for the Scathing Reviews. (about why I bother with negative reviews, how I sort of regret them, and how looking for an agent makes me nervous about them.)
• Reading Authors’ Favorite Poems (and a review for each one)
• In Defense of Romance (as a genre, since our bookstore finally has a romance section)