One of my big nonfiction projects this past year was co-editing a huge, 130,000 word collection of instructional articles for writers, called MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, with writer Heidi Ruby Miller. It’s early, but the website for the book has launched, and many insightful features are planned for it in the months leading up to the book’s release this coming Spring:
http://manygenres.blogspot.com
If you write or teach writing, no matter what genre, this book is for you. Horror readers will likely be familiar with some of the names in the book. Gary Braunbeck launches the book with an article on first lines; Mary SanGiovanni appears in the book with an essay on “Mood and Atmosphere in Horror”; David Morrell contributes an insightful gathering of “Five Pieces of Advice for Potential Thriller Writers”; Thomas Montelelone shares the lessons learned from editing his classic Borderlands anthology in an article called “No Such Thing as Original Sin”; Steven Piziks discusses how he got media novelizations for titles like Exorcist IV; Lucy Snyder talks about how to network at genre conventions; Michael Bracken discusses the art of the short story… for my part, I also contributed four articles, including an essay on “The Element of Surprise: Psyching-Out Readers of Horror, Mystery and Suspense.” And that’s just a small sampling of this very large book (60 contributors!).
If you like the “Instigation” prompts on The Goreletter, then this will likely appeal to you. But even if you don’t write, you might find the insights of your favorite writers, talking “behind the scenes” about their genre work, of high interest. As editor, I can tell you that the quality of the advice in this book is really quite impressive. You can review the full contents list via the MANY GENRES weblog.