Writing is Cake

I recently had the awesome experience of giving a presentation entitled “Surviving The Next Zombie Uprising” at Ignite Phoenix II. The format revolves around a 20 page presentation, with the slides automatically clicking over every 15 seconds. The five minutes feels like it goes by in a blur as you hit the main [...]

The shotgun was heavy in the boy’s hand. It was an old .410–a single-shot Winchester with a top lever action and an exterior hammer. His grandpa had been shooting it since childhood, and in the chamber was an old-fashioned paper cartridge filled with birdshot. The boy had three more shells tucked into his shirt pocket, [...]

Pheromones Eric M. Bahle August 23, 2008
The smell of cigarette smoke clung to the nurse’s clothes. It was under the smell of antiseptic soap, over the smell of Chantilly lace. Brandi probably would have missed it if the nurse hadn’t leaned so close to give her the baby. The baby fumbled at Brandi’s nipple and [...]

The teenager who works behind the counter at the corner convenience store after school; the hot girl in spandex who works out at the gym in the mornings; the elderly widow that lives across the street and two houses down. What do they have in common? Well, in a zombie story, they may [...]

Artist Eric M. Bahle August 10, 2008
Takezo smiled up at the bird. The little thrush had not flown away as the warriors formed up at dawn. It watched from its branch, calm and unconcerned. When the grey dawn began to lighten, the thrush began to sing, unbothered by the armored men in the clearing. As [...]

“[Bill] entered the room, which could only be described as nondescript.”
I’m going to leave off the citation of where I stumbled across that particular sentence to protect the guilty.  The next few lines, not surprisingly, proceeded to describe the room.  It was an office waiting room, with tan carpeting, brown chairs, neatly stacked magazines, and [...]

Lazy writing.  We’ve all done it.  I’m doing it right now.  You’ll be lucky to get one coherent thought out of this entry.  There’s some obvious signs of lazy writing.  ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ let’s you know right up front.  Recently, my wife handed me a novel and asked me if it [...]

One of the tasks I face as a high school English teacher is helping my students learn to read a text both critically and analytically.  There are numerous ways to do this, of course, but a method that I have found to be particularly effective is approaching stories from an archetypal perspective.  An archetype is [...]

I’ve been a deep fan of Alan Moore’s graphic novel for twenty years now, but I’m torn on the upcoming film version.  It was written to be a comic, and it works brilliantly in that format.  It doesn’t need to be a movie. Yet part of me would love to see these images move and [...]

Writing is a lonely occupation. You fight the blank page into submission (or at least to a draw), sweat over the details, rewrite it a million times, then hand it off to someone else who says “It was nice.”  It’s one reason I’m such a fan of writing groups and other ways for writers to [...]