Inspirational Quote of the Week

Writing Prompt: Twist Ending

One of the most controversial of all plot moves is the twist ending. A twist ending can make a great book better, as it does in Fight Club or in the short story The Lottery, but it can also ruin a book or movie if written improperly. But it can be fun to write twist…

Parable Press: Open To Submissions

Parable Press is an emerging online literary journal that publishes flash fiction, short stories, poems, creative non-fiction, reviews, and essays. Their website is well organized and easy to browse. They often pair work with intriguing black and white photographs. They are not interested in genre work, their only exception to this is that they will…

Cactus Heart: Open To Submissions

Cactus Heart is a quarterly e-magazine that publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. They are a relatively new magazine for emerging writers, but they have already received a number of positive reviews and are quickly becoming more established. Quarterly issues of Cactus Heart are available as a full-color PDF. They also produce two additional print…

What Gail Carson Levine Taught Me About Writing

During my years as a student at Brigham Young University, I occasionally volunteered with the annual speculative fiction symposium—Life, the Universe and Everything. As a committee member, I would help with registration, judge the writing competition and hand out nametags. One year, we ran into an problem: Gail Carson Levine didn’t have anyone who could…