On pacing.

People talk about pacing as if it were some great and mysterious thing. However, mostly what pacing is, is a laborious observation of three ostensibly dull areas: Paragraph length. Sentence length. Word length. Once you have a grasp on those things, then you can start worrying about: Scene length. Chapter length. Plotting (how thick and […]

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Following My Own Advice: A mother’s rant to her teenager

I had to talk to my daughter, Ray, about how to know whether someone was using her.  She’s very empathic, very good at reading people, and pretty emotionally wise for her age, so people tend to lean on her when they have personal issues, and she tends to shut down at school. First we talked

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Nightmare Magazine’s Top 100 Horror Books: The End of a Reading List

So it’s official:  I’ve finished Nightmare Magazine’s Top 100 Horror Books, from beginning to end.  It’s been almost three years; I’m working on several horror lists with MB Partlow and Shannon Lawrence, and this is one of them.  Shannon’s original post tracking the project is here.  (She’s doing the best job of keeping track of

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Sleep-deprived Ironies and the Power of the Internet

I took the entire weekend off (and away from the Internet) in order to relax…and ironically didn’t sleep more than a couple of spotty hours last night. Strangely, not tired yet. Feeling a lot better, in fact – I spent a lot of time awake going, “You don’t have to let people suck the life

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Biased toward Worldbuilding: A near-future thriller’s insight

One of the ghostwriting books that I just wrapped up was a near-future thriller, a la Blade Runner, if a bit less so.  The world isn’t that much of a jump away from what we know now; it’s set fewer than ten years out, and nothing in the book is much of a stretch (other than

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