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…

Inspirational Quote of the Week

Apex Magazine: A Magazine of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

Apex is an online journal that publishes short stories, and poetry in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. They also publish stories that combine the aforementioned genres. However they are most interested in work in these genres that also has literary merit. Apex may focus on genre work but it is a highly respected…

Writing Prompt: Invasion

You wake up in bed. You hear the sound of a gun being loaded, or a vase being broken, or the door being kicked in. You start writing from the point of being woken up by a strange and dangerous sound. What happens next is up to you. You could be writing from your own…

Swarm: A Beautiful Literary Journal

Swarm is an online journal that publishes only four pieces each issue. They publish two short stories and two poems. Their website is beautiful and clutter free. With so few other options to distract them, readers gravitate towards the work. Each work is published along with a thorough bio and a picture of the author….

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…

Inspirational Quote of the Week

Whenever I teach a class at the university level, I put a quote on the board every day. This quote is the one I write on the board during the first day in class. Ray Bradbury has some of the best advice for writers, but this statement has to be one of his best. Even…

5 Ways to Build an Audience for Your Blog

Whether you are a beginning writer looking to build a platform as a writer, or an experienced writer maintaining connections with your readers, blogging about writing may be part of getting readers to read your own writing, or inspiring others with their own projects.  But in a world over saturated with writing advice, how do…

Review: The 22 Magazine

The 22 Magazine is a twice yearly publication based out of New York. It has an online and print format. They feature 22 contributors in each issue. They publish visual art as well as poetry, songs, short fiction, and non-fiction. The 22 Magazine is aesthetically pleasing and easy to read and enjoy, both online and…

Review: [untitled]

[untitled] is a print  journal published yearly by Busybird Publishing, an Australian company that also publishes themed anthologies. [untitled] only publishes short stories. They are not interested in poetry and non fiction. They publish around 20 short stories per issue, a few of the stories are selected from a short story competition (which has an…

Writing Prompt: Character Sketch

Today our prompt is a little different. When writing one often gets stuck with figuring out what a character will do next. The better one knows a character, the easier it is to write what happens next. One of the ways I get a better handle on my characters is to create a cheat sheet….

3 Steps to Complete Your Manuscript (So It Can Finally Be Published)

When you write a book, it is officially called a manuscript until it is published. However one of the tricky things about writing is that it can be very hard to discern when a manuscript is actually finished and ready to be submitted to an agent, or self-published. Some authors constantly tweak their work and…

Writing Prompt: Circus Time

If you have been writing one book for a long time you can feel stuck in the characters, stifled by the setting, and bogged down by the plot. This is an easy exercise to clear your mind, but it is also a good exercise to try if you are just getting used to a new…