Nothing About Owls

Reading Time: 2 minutes This has to be the year the bodies crest the top of the structure, because her parents are selling the cabin. They keep saying, It’s changed, it’s changed, it’s not the same. Even when she says she doesn’t care how it used to be, that she likes it now.

Table 19

Reading Time: 17 minutes A woman tries to intervene with the fate of a young barista, but fate will not be cheated.

A foxlike creature wears an indigo hat and cape in a dark, starry forest. It is snowing.

Writing Advice of the Week: Make Sense of the Self-Edit

Reading Time: 9 minutes An ambition to write or edit a book without clear and quantifiable goals and a path to achieve those goals — whatever that looks like for each of us — is just a wish. And wishes don’t write drafts. Getting back on track doesn’t need to come with a headache, though.

A Gift in Ink

Reading Time: 4 minutes When a mysterious letter written in strange disappearing ink arrives from the daughter he banished long ago for dabbling in sorcery, a father must decipher her cryptic confession before the words and his memories fade into oblivion.

Clowns In The Woods

Reading Time: 31 minutes An anxious young man gets more than he bargained for when he accompanies his fiance’s family on a hunting trip.

Writing Advice of the Week: Get Consistent to Boost Creativity

Reading Time: 8 minutes If you find yourself spinning your writerly wheels without gaining traction, it may be time to step back from the project at hand. But this doesn’t mean you stop writing. Instead, it’s time to learn about storytelling, content structure, or other aspects of writing from life itself.

333 Years

Reading Time: 4 minutes Here we have an unexpected intersection of past and present when Fate takes a hand to things up.

Betty And The Demon

Reading Time: 17 minutes Irish-born Father Donahey has been retired to Winterset, Iowa after many years of service as a Catholic Priest in South America. He finds something quite different from the life of books and long rural walks that he expects. The community is awash with supernatural creatures, some friendly, many decidedly not. From selkies and pookas of Irish mythology to pixies, demons, and shape-shifters, Father Donahey must deal with them all to protect his new parish, and the world at large from chaos and destruction.

In this story, a rich computer designer who recently moved from Silicon Valley demands his help in exorcising a demon from his sentient AI, before the evil creature uses the facilities of the supercomputer to rain destruction on the world. Computer geek, priest, and two disabled military veterans fight their way into the computer facility to either send the demon back to hell or to destroy the AI.

Writing Advice of the Week: Intention Goes A Long Way

Reading Time: 7 minutes We’re just over halfway through National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and if you’re anything like the authors with whom I work, you may be hitting that mid-novel slump. And getting beyond the slump becomes the primary goal. So, how do you keep writing when the writing is hard?

Come the Waters High

Reading Time: 4 minutes A flash fantasy story about a High Priestess who must deal with rising tides that threaten to drown her people.

Control Alt Delete

Reading Time: 21 minutes Ben is reveling in his tragically achieved freedom. He thinks he has it made, except for an elusive partner. Then an unknown woman first DMs then stands him up. His troubles have only begun when he realizes how thoroughly someone has infiltrated his technological fortress.

AI-Gen monster with horns is surrounded by books while eating a meal by candlelight

Writing Advice of the Week: Characters Are People Too

Reading Time: 4 minutes One of the most common bits of advice given to authors is to humanize their characters. Give them flaws. Dreams. Fears. Desires. Yada, yada, yada. But if you’ve filled out character profile sheets, you know how little value this piece of advice actually provides.

From Below

Reading Time: 15 minutes In the aftermath of a climate apocalypse, Jeremy and Alex survive by supplying food to the wealthy people living above the water, in the penthouses of Old Manhattan. But the wealthy aren’t the only ones that are hungry.

Writing Advice of the Week: Get Out of Your Own Way

Reading Time: 3 minutes Whether it’s imposter syndrome that has you down, the stress of balancing writing against all the other things we do each day, feeling a lack of inspiration, or something else, I want to help you get out of your own way so you can complete your story and gain that coveted sense of achievement of having crossed off “write a book” from your bucket list.

My Brain Through Your Brain

Reading Time: 5 minutes When Katie’s brain seems to jump out of sync she discovers another, almost identical, mind living inside her own. This duplicate mind gradually is not what she seems but instead something far more dangerous.

Compost

Reading Time: 4 minutes A mother, desperate to feed her young son, takes a risk that doesn’t pay off.

Silent at the Mouth

Reading Time: 4 minutes After an elective medical procedure, a “Blank” remains a living being, completely anonymized and freed from any visible identity. If one showed up in your life refusing to leave, would you remember who they once were and what they’d meant to you?

This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Oct. 22, 2023

Reading Time: 10 minutes National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner and many of us are ideating or planning for the big 50K. But if you find yourself doing anything at all except what you want to get done within the next week and a half, check out these articles about balancing priorities and meeting goals and pick up a few tips to get through writer’s block, too.

(Image created by Marie Ginga using Firefly)

The Scrivener

Reading Time: 16 minutes Brother Silas is unhappy with his lot at the abbey. He sees no alternative until a unique manuscript comes his way.

Skins

Reading Time: 11 minutes A remote cabin in the southwest desert is the scene of an alien invasion, but it’s not what you think. Maybe the ghost hunters have it wrong.

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