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I’ve been thinking a lot about werewolf lore and where it comes from. My husband and I watched the 1941 movie The Wolf Man recently. What a cast! Not only Lon Chaney, but also Bela Lugosi and Claude […]
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It takes more than biographies to make characters come to life Writer’s block, that mythical phantom, plagues all writers at some point. Among the many reasons you might be facing a brick wall, one is not knowing a […]
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On writing community and demonic compulsion What does it take to write a novel? In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley says that the desire to write a novel is the only prerequisite needed to […]
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Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones is not your typical werewolf book. Werewolves have been twisted, molded, and (in my opinion) maligned in popular fiction and movies. Vampires have archetypal antecedents to draw on—Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu, for […]
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Genre in fiction can be a slippery beast. Sometimes I don’t know what to say when people ask me in what genre I write. I usually say that I am broadly writing in the fantasy genre. Sometimes I […]
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The Magic Circle by Barry Ryerson takes the reader on a twisty, exciting ride through a post-apocalyptic world. I’d call this a techno-magic-thriller. Is that a genre? If not, I just made it up. The devastation wreaked by […]
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Queen of Hearts is the first in a series of fantasy books that follow the young Princess of Wonderland. Colleen Oakes has taken Lewis Carroll’s work as a starting point to build an interesting and coherent world. This […]
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The City of Bones is the first book in a fantasy series by Cassandra Clare, the Shadowhunter series. The book imagines a world in which magical creatures of all sorts exist, but are generally invisible to ordinary humans. […]
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The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Book 1 of a cycle of four books) is about magic and yearning. The main characters, all teenagers of 16 or 17 years, try to solve a magical mystery while they struggle […]
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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a dreamlike mystery that unfolds like a rose: first the petals are tightly closed, but as they open one by one, a new flower is revealed. At the start, the protagonist, who narrates […]
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