Horror Writing Courses & Academics in 2008

This morning I saw that Boing Boing posted news about the Alpha SF Workshop for Teens -- and it occurred to me that I've been remiss about announcing that I'll be teaching at this writer's workshop for young genre fans this year, alongside Tamora Pierce, Timothy Zahn, and the very cool Chris McKitterick. Application deadline is March 1st. I will also be leading a Flash Fiction writing workshop at Context SF Convention in September. It was exceptionally cool to be the Horror Guest of Honor at Context last year; this year's guest horror writer is Brian Keene, and other horror…

On Writing Horror

The book, On Writing Horror, is among the best "how-to" books for writers working in the genre of fear, and a newly revised edition has just been published. Any writer who hopes to terrify their readers should pick up a copy of this newly updated edition of the classic textbook in writing and marketing horror fiction. Written by members of the Horror Writer's Association (contributors include Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, David Morrell, Harlan Ellison, Jack Ketchum, Tom Piccirilli and many more!), the book covers a surprisingly wide range of issues with insight -- from how to craft monster stories…

Left Behind

This collage appears in Eye Contact, the literary magazine I advise at Seton Hill University where I teach. The theme for this particular issue of the magazine was "truth." I clipped words and phrases out of Weekly World News; when I began, I thought I'd build a collage of freaky and bizarre headlines, but I found myself instead pulling out the more "normal" terms and assembling them in an abnormal way. The "shout out" style of the excessive typography, I'm hoping, renders everything strangely familiar. I believe the "left behind" phrase at the center originally referred to that whole "Left…

Reader’s Guide to 100 Jolts

Because my flash fiction collection, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, was getting some attention from creative writing teachers -- and because I know some folks were teaching selected excerpts to various classes -- my publisher and I thought it might be worthwhile to produce a free teacher's guide/reader's guide to accompany it. I finished writing the guide this summer and you can now download it free as an .rtf file (MS Word ~500k) or .pdf file (Adobe ~100k) If you're a teacher or someone who's running a lecture on the craft of horror fiction, you might find it useful, whether…