PEOPLE OF THE NIGHT by Deborah Elliott-Upton Sometimes late at night, I drive to an open all-night diner. Alone, I sit in a booth with a novel and drink coffee. I sip the coffee slowly. I don’t really need the caffeine after midnight any more than I need to read a book in a restaurant. […]

THE STYLE IS THE SUBSTANCE by Rob Lopresti I shouldn’t be writing this. For once I am working on a deadline: writing a story for an anthology and I have just under a month to turn something in. For a guy who usually takes years to fine tune a story, this is crazyland. But I […]

AFTER THE FALL by Melodie Johnson Howe I took a fall. I blame my dog, Dr. Watson. He pushed me. After all P. D. James thought Humpty Dumpty was pushed. (In crime fiction people don’t fall by themselves.) Not being an egg or even an egg head, I didn’t break into a thousand pieces. But […]

MULTI-TAXING by James Lincoln Warren Although the term wasn’t coined until 1966, and then in the context of computers, multi-tasking (more recently spelled without the hyphen, I note, a sure indication that the word has become thoroughly domesticated) has been with us all along. I think the first reference I ever heard to the phenomenon […]

The STORY INSIDE by Leigh Lundin In some ways, this is a companion piece to John Floyd’s column from yesterday. His flowchart caught my eye, a remnant of our common past as software engineers, a past we share with a guy named David Wroblewski. Sharon, editor, writer, teacher, and my friend Steve’s girlfriend invited me […]

MAP QUEST by John M. Floyd One of the questions I’m often asked at book signings (it ranks just below “Where do you get your ideas?” and “Can you point me to the section on nonfiction?”) is: “Do you outline your stories before you start writing?” It’s an easy question to answer, but I always […]

WRITING ON THE FOURTH by Steve Steinbock For those of us living in the United States of America, today is our nation’s birthday. To our British cousins, well, our George beat your George, but that was a long time ago, so we can still be friends. Back in the 1700s, air conditioning meant swinging your […]