Category: Guest Post

The Adage Still Applies: Never Judge a Book by its Cover

Daemon Manx

Never judge a book by its cover. It was my mother who first taught me this valuable life lesson. The adage resonates like a divine mantra or a proverb gifted to me by a wise sage. (Which mom certainly was) 

As authors, I would like to believe we are an accepting lot with open minds and humble hearts; that we don’t make assumptions about others and are not judgmental on first impressions. I would also like to believe that the world is progressing and that our community is blazing the trail. At the end of the day, we are all different in our unique way. It might be the color of our skin, our race, religion, our sexual identity, or our gender. Still, with all these wonderful flavors and varieties, we are more alike than we are not. And judging someone by any of these identifiers or their cover would be impossible. 

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How the Duck to Write with a Newborn

by Gwendolyn N. Nix

Can you tell I’m tapping away at my phone here? I have a two month old passed out on my lap and moving him to his bassinet will result in a cranky, awake infant. The first days of early motherhood were ones of exhaustive leisure full of cooing and awing before tapping away at my phone while he was on feeding #20 or nap #176 or, dare I say, doing both at the same time. But this “free time” quickly whittled away when faced with the onslaught of sleep deprivation, crying, holding, singing, playing, and overall being a constant vaudeville show for one tiny human. Hey, it’s all supposed to help with brain development. Just wish the ticket sales would break even.

And I know things are only going to keep getting… well, “worse” is the wrong term… more like the vaudeville show is going to add a couple more acts like “Toddler Acrobatics” and “What’s That In Your Mouth?” bracketing the 8-hour intermission of “Full-Time Job.” 

So, how the duck am I supposed to get anything done?

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Quick Tips on Writing a Novelette

by

Deborah Sheldon

The novelette is often labelled, erroneously, as a “long short story” or a “short novella”. In fact, the novelette is a category in its own right. By strict definition, it’s a stand-alone work of fiction that’s between 7,500 and 17,500 words in length. Famous examples in the horror genre are Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 

The novelette offers the satisfaction of writing a complex long-form piece requiring a similar kind of devotion to plot and character as the novella or novel, but in a more manageable size. I’ve written and had published a few novelettes. My latest is The Again-Walkers (Demain Publishing), a supernatural-Viking-noir-horror tale of about 13,500 words.

Fancy trying your hand at a novelette? Or, if you’re writing a piece that’s already hit the 5,000-word mark, do you want to dig a little deeper into the narrative and develop your short story into a novelette? Here are my tips.

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What THIS Editor Wants…and Doesn’t Want
By Ty Drago

Twenty-Four years ago, I founded the ezine that is, today, known as ALLEGORY (www.allegoryezine.com). Since that fateful day in June 1998, I have published almost 70 issues featuring at total of over 800 short stories and articles by new and established writers worldwide. In the process of doing so, my staff (which began as just me but now includes five senior editors and seven associate editors) has reviewed roughly 50,000 unsolicited submissions—or, to use the colloquial industry term: “slush.” If you don’t feel like doing the math, that averages out to about 2,100 slush pieces per year, about 175 per month, or somewhere around 5.8 a day.

That’s quite a lot, especially considering that we all are, and always have been, volunteers.

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Planting Seeds and Watering Your Audience
by: Jaymie Wagner

When I started writing what would become the Sing For Me stories, I had plans on where to start, a synopsis of events that should happen along the way, and a rough idea of the end. 

Of course, anyone who has ever written a story knows it’s never that easy!
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If you could create a new holiday, what would it be?

by: S. R. Cronin

Speculative fiction writers love to make things up. It’s one of the many reasons we do what we do. Yet, most creations are twists on things that already exist. For instance, I made up eight new holidays in the Seven Troublesome Sisters books, along with a complete calendar system, but it all relates to seasons of the year and resembles Wiccan and Druid holidays in our world.

When I saw this question about creating a new holiday, however, I smiled. An original holiday may be my only original creation and it had nothing to do with writing speculative fiction. It had to do with writing poetry.
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Deep in the Mines of Folklore and Urban Legend

By

Robert P. Ottone

“Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.” It’s hard to top the First Lady of the American Theater, Helen Hayes, but there you have it. The magic of legends, whether urban or folkloric, lies in the blending of truth and obfuscation of reality. As someone who likes to mine a region’s folklore and urban legends for material, there’s a thrill in playing with tradition while putting one’s own spin on a classic tale.

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Magick and Mayhem!

By

Teel James Glenn

Magick and Mayhem! It conjures up images (yes, its a pun) of cataclysmic tableaus of explosive bursts of light and earth-shaking forces in a battle between warlocks and warriors. But what governs these forces? How is it different from the wave of a wand to make a flower grow or levitate a table? And must they all be grand cataclysmic events, or can simple levitation count?

Drama is, after all, ultimately conflict. It follows then, that as fantasy is a form of drama, it must ultimately involve some sort of fantastic conflict. Like all good drama, however, it must have grounded in characters and principles that a reader can identify with or you lose the connection to the audience and everything becomes just gibberish. 

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