This blog post is coming to you extremely late. I’d have skipped it altogether, but I left you hanging last Tuesday and I really need to finish laying this foundation, because tomorrow we’re going to build on it. For what it’s worth: I’ve got a great excuse. I’ve just been so busy with the final [...]

I started the week talking about my short story class, and some of the challenges that come with providing feedback to our peers. The worst of it was talking about a sex scene buried in one of the many stories we’ve read so far. And, mostly, it was a whole lot of worrying over nothing. [...]

Yesterday I talked about some of the things I learned about reader expectations in my Category Fiction class. By way of example, I mentioned some techniques for building suspense in Thriller novels. There was more, though. To my horror, I realized after six months of promoting my suspense series as a Thriller that it’s a [...]