The Body in Fear

By Kathe Koja

If you write things that cause fear, you know how to describe the deliberately unseen, know how to go where the rational deserts us, and no one will help us, and flight or violence might be our only options for survival: you know what it feels like to be afraid.   

But then the day’s work is over, and you leave that fearful place behind.

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Ten Ironclad Rules for Writing the Novel You Just Finished

By: Joel Dane

I published twenty-six books, most of them with the Big Five, before I managed to stop giving a shit. Then I wrote my passion project: a short, deranged, cozy postapocalyptic novel that I believe is about the necessity of miscommunication, though I can’t be sure.

THE RAGPICKER is the closest thing to horror that I’ve written, because the best horror embraces the unfathomable, the irrational, the unknowable. Instead of providing closure and comfort, horror offers lessons which don’t, to paraphrase Scarlett Thomas, teach us how to turn our lives into copies of stories.

The only person I’m qualified to teach about writing is me, and even that’s a stretch. Still, here are ten tips for how to write the book I just finished. (With apologies to James Carse, whose Finite and Infinite Games inspired some of this.)

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Real AI

J. Scott Coatsworth

With all the talk of Generative AI these days – ChatGPT, MidJourney and the like, I think we lose sight of what “real” artificial intelligence is.

Generative AI really isn’t intelligence at all, or at least not yet – some people think it could be a springboard for true intelligence at some point. But for now, it’s just an advanced version of the thing that powers your phone’s text predictor – that thing that shows the next word(s) it thinks you might be about to type based on what you’ve already typed so far.

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Time and the deep, black lake: resurrecting a story you’ve given up for dead

Have you ever written a story you loved so much but just couldn’t get to work? A stack of pages (whether real or metaphorical) you look upon with pangs of regret each time you slide open your (real or metaphorical) desk drawer—that drawer where all the other trunkers lay, forsaken? Do you ever take it out to reconsider with a kind of conflicted longing, as you might think back on a past lover—a lover with whom things were both electric and ill-fated—wishing it would either reveal itself in all its naked glory, or stop calling and let you get on with your life? 

Some stories are just like that. And though it may be painful, to set them free we have to let them go. (Let them go, yes—but never, not ever, throw them away.)

I wrote the first draft of the title novella in my short story collection, The Measure of Sorrow, close on ten years ago. I wrote it in a white heat of ideas piling on ideas, of puzzle pieces attracted one to another that just fit, of sustained inspiration that took me deep down, away from the original story seed, and into places I’d never explored before. It was exhilarating. I loved it. But it didn’t work.

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Answering Your Writing-Related Questions

by Jeremy C. Shipp

For the sake of this post, I decided to hop around from social media platform to social media platform, collecting writing-related questions from aspiring and established authors. I visited Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Hive, Mammoth, Swarm, Toilet Bowl, Void, Eldritch Cucumber, Flibbertigibbet, Tally-ho, Razzmatazz, the Other Void, Giant Brain, Giant Brian, Egg, the Lost City of Atlantis, the Found City of Atlantis, Cookie Jar, Dimension Number 8364883, Eldritch Pickle. Anyway, here are some of the questions people had for me, along with my attempts to answer them.

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