The Tangled Web We Weave

Creating the second draft of a novel can involve delictately altering the original story or it may require radical [...]

Revision, and How it Changes a Fella…

I started a novel back at the beginning of November.  I wrote well beyond the required fifty thousand words required for Nanowrimo and the annual challenge, and sometime in January, I finished.  The book came in between 80,000 and 90,000 words.  I immediately set it aside.  I don’t know how many know or remember, but [...]

Thomas Sullivan: MAKING LOVE or BETWEEN THE COVERS (of a book)

I think choosing a career or a genre is a little like making love. Well…a lot like making love. You have a certain skill set, and we can call that your power of attraction — your good looks. Good looks (as women always know) grant the power of choice, and so you use your skill [...]

Thomas Sullivan: FLAMINGO FRANK & THE WHITE FEATHER — FINDING MEANING IN EVERYDAY TALES

Sorry for leaving you in the woods last month.  February’s Cannibal Essay was half a quest, and this is part 2.  The point of the two columns is to take the most mundane circumstances possible and try to make stories out of them, because you can always invent adrenaline rushes but unless you can find [...]

Thomas Sullivan: DO STUCK PIGS SWEAT, NEGOTIATING ROMANCE, AND THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

It was the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it on the wrong day.  The direction I took couldn’t have been more wrong, and my clothes were all wrong for the woods and the snow.  Whether because of wrong decisions I made, a bunch of other things went wrong along [...]

Thomas Sullivan: “HELP! HELP! THEY’VE STOLEN MY BOOK AND ALL THE WORDS AND EVERYTHING!”

Every author’s got one — a tale about a stolen tale.  They are so identical you might say we stole them from each other.  And — brace yourself — you may be abetting stolen intellectual property rights just by reading this, because even the subject has been used before in other columns.  But if [...]

Thomas Sullivan: GROWING UP DEAD

Thomas Sullivan: INSPIRATION IS A DUET

Thomas Sullivan: THE MYSTIQUE & THE MISTAKE AT CROSSLAKE or GLENN FREY & SULLY ON CREATIVITY Part 2

THOMAS SULLIVAN: FLAMINGO FRANK