Tomorrow I’ll publish the third piece of Dead Sara inspired flash fiction. It was written with ‘We Are What You Say’ looping in the background. It’s from their first album which I heard way back in…I’m not sure when it was. All I can say is that they only had one album out when I heard their self-titled release, so somewhere between 2012 and 2014. What’s crazy is that for years I hadn’t listened to the album, or even remembered that I had it. When I started writing fiction a

Sometimes I have the burning desire to erase every single metaphor and simile I use in writing. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I wonder if I could improve my story telling by not relying on them at all. In Dwellers, I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum. To my own minimum, I mean. In some cases, I erased a newly forming metaphor in mid-sentence and looked for a more direct description so as not to distract the reader from the story. But is a metaphor a distraction? If w

Writing Dwellers has me thinking about word count, or more specifically, the strange gap between novella and novel. When browsing through my own collection of novels I saw that nearly every book I own is over 300 pages long, with some nearly 1000 pages long. I’m not sure what these novels are in word count, but they are probably between 75,000 and 400,000 words. Why don’t I have many short novels? As far as I know, novellas top out at 40,000 words and novels generally start