ROCKET TO STARDOM by Melodie Johnson Howe When I was a young contact player I was told to show up at the portrait studio on the Universal lot to do a shoot for the 4th of July. The walls of the room were lined with large black and white photos of the movie stars from […]

Louis Willis is one of our scholarly contributors and reviewers. He’s also a writer and critic with a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. You may remember his favorite authors include William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley, Charlotte Carter, William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, […]

WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG … by James Lincoln Warren … to bring you this Special Bulletin. Central Florida has had a massive power outage. Normally, we here at Criminal Brief wouldn’t bother our readers with Breaking News, but in this case, it has broken any possibility for Leigh to post his weekly column. […]

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE by John M. Floyd I’d like to offer an assumption. Well, maybe not an assumption — let’s call it a guess. My guess is, no matter what you do for a living and no matter how good you are at it, you sometimes stop for a minute and stare off into the distance […]

LADYBUGS ON PARADE by Steve Steinbock It must be spring. The annual infestation of Coccinellidae (Lady Bugs) has begun inside my house. Just like baseball and the thawing of the local skating pond, it happens every year around this time. As plagues go, this one is pretty benign. In fact, I enjoy it. The only […]

ADVENTURELAND by Deborah Elliott-Upton “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, […]

HOW IT WORKS by Rob Lopresti Listen up, because this is how it works. When you are engaged in creative activity two parts of your brains are involved. Some people call it the unconscious and the conscious minds. Some call it the left and right brains. Some say the muse and I, but I don’t […]