A Brief Pander To Our Primary Source of Income

It has come to my attention lately that this blog has been getting an awful lot of hits (by our standards), due primarily to this image:

I will admit that it seem a touch odd that our blog is actually considered by Google image search to be the place to go to see this thing, since I previously just put in a link to it on some other website (in my anti-Roger Ebert Spiel), but I figure, what the hell, might as well play to unexpected strengths. So if you’re here for Jericho, here are some links to reviews: thisun, thatun, t’other one, and a cartoon strip. I’ll sum them up for you: It sucked, except in the UK, apparently. Here are some other links you might find useful.

For those of you who actually give a hoot about writing, here’s the latest NaSto update: Still chugging along, in fits and starts. I’m a little under a thousand words behind, which means I dropped some, but am still keeping up relatively well. I’ve been writing lots of bits and pieces on multiple different stories, so I’ve decided that as of tomorrow, being halfway through NaSto, I will close the gates to new stories (unless they just strike me like divine inspiration) and only work on those stories which I have already worked on during NaSto. Hopefully, that way I’ll actually get one or two of these suckers finished.

More craft posts on the way, and in the meantime, here’s a link to Jim Van Pelt’s blog, which is full of craft posts. If you don’t know who Jim is, sucks to be you, but you shall now be edumacated. He’s one of the current leaders (in my opinion) in the speculative fiction short story field, well-published and how, nominated for a Nebula, And all around worth emulating. Because Jim is also a creative writing teacher, his craft posts usually take the form of exercises he does for his class, which I find fascinating and, at least for me, makes them stand out from the run-of-the-mill craft stuff you might fined on the intertubes.

Also, we recently had author Kurt Dinan stop by on the comments page to my horror post and discuss the motivation for his piece “Natural Remedies,” out now in Down in the Cellar, and a little about “Longtime Gone,” out in Chizine. Both are excellent stories and the posts give you a good insight into a writer's mind, as well as some great thoughts about the nature of horror generally, so check them out!