Cover art for Unexpected Critters by Annie Reed, featuring magical animal stories and a squirrel peering through a window.

Unexpected Critters by Annie Reed: Magical Animal Stories With Heart

Sometimes magic shows up in the unlikeliest creatures. These stories of magical animal creatures follow the ones who don’t quite fit—and the people who stumble across them. One of many creature-filled tales in the Wee Beasties StoryBundle, curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. About Unexpected Critters From a mouse with a compulsion to paint the monster […]

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Wee Beasties Storybundle Temporary Header: an image of all 14 covers from the Wee Beasties storybundle

Dec 5 2025

Wee Beasties StoryBundle: Defenders of Dream and Other Animal Fantasy Adventures

The Wee Beasties Storybundle I’ve joined a new StoryBundle, and this one has teeth. The Wee Beasties StoryBundle, curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is all about creatures that look small and harmless…right up until they don’t. Fairies, pixies, halflings, cats, mice, corgis, ghosts, orcs playing baseball, elves playing baseball, bats, rats, and other assorted critters

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Dec 3 2025

Why Indie Publishing Advice Contradicts Itself

So let’s say you’ve written a story and decide to publish it as an indie author. You have done your research, made connections, and both asked for and followed advice. Your story is of reasonable quality, it’s reasonably free of typos, and it’s got a reasonable cover, description, and all the little bits and bobs

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Image for House of Masks A Gothic Space Opera: an alien mask floating in space.

Oct 15 2025

New Release: House of Masks, a Gothic Space Opera

Now available: House of Masks The House of Masks: A Gothic Space Opera Kickstarter was a success! And now it’s time to go live to online bookstores. House of Masks is a 500+-page standalone space opera with modern Gothic sensibilities, the epic scope of a Dickens novel, and a slow build to chaos. Buy now About

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image for the witch house #2 the witch labyrinth project - image of moon, pumpkin, black cat, candle, and skull

Oct 2 2025

October 2025 fiction project: The Witch House #2

This is a children’s story, which means that I can get away with saying things I want to say to adults by saying them to children instead.–Miss Emma, Librarian New Project! I’m posting a heads-up for a project that I’m starting today, a sequel to my middle-grade horror novel The Witch House. (Middle-grade = ages 9-12.) If you’re

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Aug 24 2025

100 Best Gothic Stories

So hear me out: I think that modern Gothic fiction depends on not just rehashing old Gothic tropes, but including elements from the modern Goth subculture. Reviewing recent novels that are labeled strictly as Gothic leads to a certain paucity of choices, a sense of the same stories being told over and over out of

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Aug 19 2025

House of Masks – A Gothic Space Opera on Kickstarter

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I mean… I would like to announce that My new gothic space opera novel, House of Masks, is live on Kickstarter. If you love modern gothic fiction with a science fiction twist (and have feeling a bit like you might want to set a few things on fire lately), please click the button to take

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Blog header image for Modern Gothic Fiction blog article: Illustration in the style of modern Gothic fiction: a haunted castle under a blood-red moon, dark trees filled with crows, and shadowy figures in black cloaks evoking mystery and decay.

Aug 15 2025

Modern Gothic Fiction: From Haunted Castles to Morally Gray Survivors

So I’ve read a lot of both classic and modern Gothic fiction over the years. Gothic stories make me happy…I mean, in a cynical, disaffected, melancholy and perhaps overly dramatic way, they make me happy. I suspect it’s because I grew up in the 1980s and am neurodivergent, and had to crawl under my desk

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Aug 5 2025

How to AI-Proof Your Writing

AI writing is easy…and that’s a problem You’ve been working with AI a lot lately and have figured out how to use it to help improve your writing. Emails, blog posts, website text, social media, fiction, essays, resumes, white papers, slide decks, report summaries, book reports, homework, sales copy…you name it. The basic process goes

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Illustration of a clever crow and a lady in red in a medieval fantasy castle setting, inspired by the free dark fantasy short story "The Carrying Crow and the Tale of the Two Gold Coins" by DeAnna Knippling

Jul 1 2025

Carrying Crow and the Tale of the Two Gold Coins: A Free Dark Fantasy Short Story

This was an experiment in writing a short story with a particular type of plot; I’ll talk about that below so there aren’t spoilers. I’m working on a Kickstarter centering on my new novel House of Masks and on the first three books in my Haunted Houses series (A Murder of Crows, The House Without a

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DeAnna Knippling