by mike | May 1, 2012 | Books, Horror, Horror Movies, Research, Sword & Planet, Writing |
In an earlier post, “Horrors! Or How to Scare the ‘Yell’ Out of People,” I wrote about the effect of scaring readers and film watchers with subtle horror, rather than in-your-face buckets of blood, entrails, oozing brains, various and sundry dismembered body parts—you...
by mike | Apr 18, 2012 | Books, Fantasy, Horror, Nightmares, Research, Sword & Planet, Sword & Sorcery, Writing |
What’s the deal? A guy who writes horror, fantasy and other weird stuff thinking that creativity is a curse? To be honest—no, not the majority of the time. My brain is almost always swirling with new plots, unique characters, exotic settings and such, and for the most...
by mike | Apr 13, 2012 | Books, Research, Writers' Retreat, Writing |
Next week, when I facilitate workshops at the Hunt Country Writers’ Retreat in Virginia, I will finally get to meet Ken Kraus for the first time. Ken is a New Jersey-based writer of speculative fiction, and while I’ve worked with him on and off for years as his editor...
by mike | Apr 5, 2012 | Books, Bookstores, Fantasy, Research, Writing |
What? No, this isn’t about THAT first time. This blog is about writers, and writing, and fantasy, and horror, and stuff like that. Besides, that would be telling. This is about the first time I wrote a novel, and since I’ve written over thirty of them, I had to take a...
by mike | Apr 1, 2012 | Books, Fantasy, Horror, Movies, Research, Romance, Sword & Sorcery, Writing |
Who knew? While writing a recent post about Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and the acknowledged “father” of Sword & Sorcery, I did research to make sure some of my facts were correct. I discovered that a movie had been made about a portion of his short...
by mike | Mar 22, 2012 | Books, Fantasy, Research, Sword & Sorcery, Writing |
Everything I write—everything that just about all novelists write—begins with those two words. I prepare detailed outlines for my stories, so that I always have a pretty good idea of where I’m going. But even before outlining a story, there is the “what if?” I...
