Writing is a perilous business. At its best, the writer journeys through a portal deep into a fictional realm, and lives a multi-verse away from their nearest and dearest, causing all sorts of glitches like burnt dinners, or no dinners at all. At its worst, said fictional world does not appear on the page, causing said writer to turn into a roaring, demonic creature seldom seen outside of a William Peter Blatty novel.
ASK THE ROGUES: Secrets in a Writer’s Office
by Gayle Lynds A writer's desk reveals secrets about the writer. This is my office, me, GAYLE LYNDS. I’m not a messy person. Really. Our house is darn neat, but when I work, I go into another world that’s informed by past novels and those I hope to write. I let my creative side roam. On...
OFFICE SPACE
By Tosca Lee At one time I meant to stencile “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” above my office door. They’re the words in Dante’s Inferno carved above the gate to hell. Yes, it might be dark–made complete by the ever-favorite shot of a piano about to crush me Wiley E. Coyote style (a too-apt...
FOLLOW THE YELLOW ROAD
By Tracy Clark Recently, I was kicking back in my Dorothy Gale ruby slipper socks, and it hit me like an apple lobbed by a talking tree in a haunted forest how the story of “The Wizard of Oz” kinda of correlates to the writers’ journey, a journey fraught with setbacks and obstacles—like, for...
WHERE THE MIND GOES, THE WORD COUNT FOLLOWS … HOPEFULLY
By Tracy Clark What do writers do when they’re not writing? Beats me. The truth is, we kind of almost always are. If we’re breathing, we’re either writing-writing at a desk in a chair, or mind-writing out in the wild. You can spot us by that faraway look in our eyes as we absent-mindedly step off...