There isn’t much time left in National Novel Writing Month and you’ve found yourself behind on your quest for 50,000 words. You’ve got to write a whole lot of words in a very short time. How are you going to make up the deficit especially when you feel completely stuck?

There’s a lot of advice for last minute “cheats” but most of it is just designed to pad your count and isn’t actually helpful to your novel as a whole. For instance, in No Plot? No Problem! Chris Baty recommends cheats such as having your characters spout long quotations from books (which, of course, you’d just have to delete later) or always referring to your character by their very long, full name (Dr. Edward Robert Smith-Jones Esquire the third) which you’d only have to undo in editing. But there are a whole bunch of ways to get your word count up fast that will actually help your novel in the long run even if they are a little… unconventional. Continue Reading »

So, here’s a little something I’ve never talked about on this blog before…

Back in 2008, Hilarity Ensues, an imprint of Priced Nostalgia, put out a book called Through the Flashlight’s Beam: a collection of classic scary stories for reading aloud. This book was a collaborative effort and, though a bunch of us worked on it, none of our names appear anywhere on it. And that’s fine. It’s somewhat appropriate that we all “ghost” wrote or edited our parts because of the spirit (heh) of the project. It’s actually become pretty popular which is very gratifying to see people enjoying your work even if they have no idea you had anything to do with it.

Take a look at the cover. If you know me in real life, you may recognize our cover model. (Hint: It’s not me. Or my husband.)

But one thing that I did want to mention is this: We really wanted to include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein somewhere in the collection because it’s such a Halloween staple. But, unlike Dracula which had an excerpt published as a short story in the author’s lifetime, there was no short story version of Frankenstein. Except that… if you have a copy of Flashlight’s Beam, you’ve noticed that there IS a short story version called Frankenstein’s Bride which is an excerpt from the novel in the same way that Dracula’s Guest is an excerpt from Dracula.

I’m the one behind that short story version of Frankenstein. I’m the… what? Editor? Abridger? Who knows?

I’ve never mentioned this before because it felt silly. I didn’t really do anything other than find a section of the novel that could stand on its own and work it into a stand alone story. But even though this took some time, I didn’t actually create something new, I just mucked with existing content to make something new. (Hmmm… I may have just described my playwright career…)

In fact, you could say that I Frankensteined Frankenstein.

But Hilarity Ensues does get questions from time to time the gist of which are, “Where the hell did you people get this short story version of Frankenstein?” so I thought maybe I should out myself at last. They got it from me, y’all.

Anyway, now that I’ve come out of (one of my) ghost writing closets I wanted to direct your attention to this post from Priced Nostalgia that outlines how you can win a copy of this very book. The contest runs until Friday so get in on that.

Oh and if you wanted to, I don’t know, buy the book and read Frankenstein’s Bride or something… that’d be cool.

Sometimes I read books on recommendations from friends or bloggers whose opinions I trust. Sometimes I read things because I feel like I should be keeping up with the industry. Sometimes I read things I feel are probably “good for me” the literary equivalent of broccoli. Sometimes the book cover just looks shiny. But every now and then I have a very instant reaction to something. I take one look at it and just know instinctively I’m going to love it.

I felt that way about Vampirates which I loved though the series went downhill very rapidly which made me sad. But I *loved* the first book.

I knew from the description that I was going to love Soulless and that series has continued to be one of my absolute favorites.

I had the same gut reaction to The Ghost and the Goth. Finding out the author was a Roswell fan was just icing on the cake. Now we’re Twitter buddies. I love the internet.

My latest “I’m just going to love this!” moment happened recently and my husband laughed at my selection, as he often does. But scoff if you will, I know how to pick ‘em (at least for my tastes).

But come on! How can a graphic novel of Homer’s The Odyssey not be awesome? And, of course, it totally is.