This is Frida Kahlo’s backyard. On the left, you can just barely see inside through the back door, and standing just above head level is a paper mache monster, arms outstretched. Frida’s house was full of such figures, the kinds of strange folk art that inspired her the most. Biographies of the artist show pictures […]
Category > Editing
Hitting the trail
So my book is out. Well, it’s sort of out. If you go to the publisher, you can order the paperback edition. In about a week, you’ll be able to order the ebook. And if you look at the listing on Amazon, it’s due out April 15th. But basically, my book is leaving for […]
Stick Your Landings
Endings. Every story has one, but not every story has a good one. What makes some of them work and the rest of them fail? Well, let’s take a look at them. If you do a quick Google search for “kinds of endings,” you find a lot of different ways to categorize the varieties of endings […]
Quick-and-Dirty Tips for Polishing Your Prose
So, you’ve brainstormed, written, and rewritten. The plot is sufficiently exciting, the theme powerful, the dialogue realistic, the characters complex and believable, the ending unpredictable yet perfectly fitting. Point-of-view and tense issues have been addressed, grammatical errors corrected, clichés banished. But yet…after reading your piece one last time, a lingering dissatisfaction remains. It doesn’t seem […]
A sign of good things to come
Once again we’re closing in on the end of the year. Another year of hard work, of hope and frustration, of trying desperately to balance our need to make cool stuff with our need to pay bills and feed kids. This has been a tough one for all of us here at Inkpunks, for one […]
Too Much Time on Your Hands? Me Too.
photo (cc) Steve Groisbos A lot of writers dream of quitting their Day Job. Of unshackling themselves from corporate handcuffs of iron or gold and leap joyously into a Full Time Writing Life, where the words flow freely and the book advances are large. I am not that writer. Not really (not yet, at least). […]
Short Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion with Short Story Editors hosted by Michael Knost
Wow, do we have some great stuff for you today! Author, editor, and columnist Michael Knost shares a gem from his new book, The Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy, a collection of essays and interviews with some of the biggest names in the field, now available in bookstores and at Amazon. In the […]
Requiem for an Edit: A guest post by John Joseph Adams and Jake Kerr
Today’s guest post is from John Joseph Adams–editor of Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and more than a dozen anthologies–and one of his oft-published authors, Jake Kerr. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on between an author and an editor from a rewrite request to publication, you’re about to get a behind-the-scenes look that is invaluable […]
Writing What’s Real
Last year at a writer’s retreat a late-night talk with a friend turned to the the subject of authenticity, and the struggles inherent in creativity and learning our craft. She shared with me a lesson that I was only beginning to understand on my own, advice that she had been given by one of her […]
What are you doing differently? Reigniting the creative fire
After a kind of crazy summer I found myself completely unmotivated to write–my drive had just disappeared. No ambition, no burning desire to create, no stories pecking at my head demanding my attention. I think it might be overstating things to call it depression, since it seemed to be restricted to my creative life, but […]
