Category: Staff Articles

Writing advice and insights from the staff of Indies Unlimited.

Good Night, Irene.

Okay, I’ve seen this post a hundred times and I always said, “It’ll never happen to me.” Well, it did. What a feeling … and it is not good.

The computer glowed as I headed out to do some stuff. As usual, I waved goodbye to my electronic friend and off I went. Meanwhile, while I was out enjoying a Friday afternoon in Coral Gables, meeting a friend for happy hour, my computer decides to have its own kind of happy hour.

On arrival back at the homestead, I saw the blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. Ah—no problem, I thought. This has happened to me a million times. Punching the button, I sat back, waiting for the monster to awaken from its sleep. Nothing—after a few minutes, all I saw was a black screen with that damned cursor blinking at me from the upper left hand corner. Continue reading “Good Night, Irene.”

A reviewer’s blues…

I’m miserable. Well no, not miserable – that’s a little too strong, perhaps. Depressed. No, that’s not quite right either. Where’s a thesaurus when you need one? Frustrated!!! That’s the word.

Just as authors get various grievances and down days – writer’s block, not enough time, not enough sales, bad reviews – believe it or not, reviewers have ups and downs of their own.

Mine at the minute is my dauntingly long review list. Continue reading “A reviewer’s blues…”

Catharsis or Carnival?

As anyone connected to the horror genre can tell you, we get more than our fair share of questions that boil down to “why do you read/write that stuff?” along with the accompanying nervous sidelong looks and wrinkled nose gestures. And, put on the spot, I’ve always found it difficult to give a reasoned answer, settling for either the glib (“because I’m more twisted than a yoga mom wrestling with a Slinky in a pretzel machine”) or the cop-out (a bewildered shrug). So when Sue Palmer from Book Junkies did me the recent kindness of asking me a far more nuanced and generously-phrased version of that question, I snapped her hand off and wrote down some thoughts. Only, I didn’t actually snap her hand off. That’s a metaphor, thankfully. Here are those thoughts, and I think they come closest to capturing what it is about the genre that attracts me, repels me, keeps me coming back as a reader, writer and even viewer. Well, all this and the euphoric thrill of the carnival ride, too; let’s not forget that. Continue reading “Catharsis or Carnival?”

Ed’s Casual Friday: Get a helmet

We are all writers.

No, I don’t mean everybody, I mean specifically the people likely to be reading this post on Indies Unlimited. I totally don’t think just *everybody* can write, and if I ever had thought such a thing, grading freshman comp papers would have disabused me of the notion. Seriously, some of those kids couldn’t have put together a suicide note with a discernible climax. But I digress… Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: Get a helmet”