BUZZWORDS– bang * splat! by Leigh Lundin From my eMail: "… of the inspirational magickal leprechaun prayer chain. Forward this to 122 people in the next 15 seconds or you’ll be subject to liver spots, gout, a goiter the size of an iPad, Windows Vista, the collapse of the national economy, and the heartbreak of psoriasis." […]

INSIDE INFO by John M. Floyd I like trivia. I always have. I think it’s fun, somehow, to discover little-known and often useless facts about the people and places and things that share this world of ours. Who knows, maybe it’s fun because it is useless: the pursuit of meaningless information is of course more […]

CEREAL MURDERS by Steve Steinbock Some very good novels – and even a few short stories – have been written about serial killers. It’s a subgenre that’s been done, done well, and sadly overdone. I’m not going to talk about that kind of serial killing this week. I’ve had a few interesting reading experiences in […]

BABYSTEPS by Deborah Elliott-Upton Recently at a writers meeting, I was asked by another writer about copyrights and in particular if she could include in her book a story about an angelic encounter she’d heard from another woman. My intern Summer and her friend Madison sat on the other side of me. I thought this […]

TAKING DEDICATIONS by Rob Lopresti I’ve been reading Once Again To Zelda, Marlene Wagman-Zeller’s book about the stories behind dedications of novels. Among the tales she tells my favorites include: * Adam Bede, by George Eliot. In this case, the dedication did not make it into the book. Eliot wanted to salute her husband George […]

Here is the conclusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of guilt and sin in colonial New England. THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL Part 3 of 3 by Nathaniel Hawthorne From that time no attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper’s black veil, or, by a direct appeal, to discover the secret which it was supposed to hide. […]

THEORETICALLY SPEAKING by James Lincoln Warren I think that most writers learn their craft through reverse engineering: you take a story you like, figure out how its different ingredients make it tick, and try to construct something along the same lines. A well-known example of this is Mary Higgins Clark’s claim that she learned how […]