The best lie has a nugget of truth. Likewise, the best fictional story has a nugget, or maybe an entire Happy Meal, of reality. Check out any fantasy book, and you’ll find parallels to either present or historical elements. They might be leaders, wars, or social movements. So why is truth stranger than fiction? In…
Are you trying to figure out a crazy street name to use in your story? I’ve compiled a list of these for you to refer to for ideas, and the names of some streets are truly wacky. Most of these streets are located in the United States, but there are some that are in England…
Jodie M. Swanson, a graduate from Owen-Withee High School, has served in the US Air Force and writes what her dreams tell her to. Sometimes she blurs the genre line when writing fantasy, paranormal, military/conspiracy, and alien contact. In her science fiction writing, she uses lots of real-life conversations and experiences. Her first work, Another…
Have you ever walked around in Alabama with an ice cream cone in your back pocket? I hope you’ve not put salt on a railroad track while there either. When you were flying over Alaska, were you caught staring at a moose out of your plane window? Would you be brave enough—or stupid enough—to wake…
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it is up to the author to write those thousand words. (Richard Petracca) Will you be the one to write those thousand words? When you look at a picture, do you only see what is right in front of your eyes? Or do you see…
Hello, everybody. My name is Stephen Helmes, and I am the author of the Nightly Visits series. I was born in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, in the U.S.A. It’s a nice place to Google if you enjoy reading about historical locations. Fort Oglethorpe and Chickamauga are places where one of the major battles of the American…
How mysterious and scary is your monster? If your monster were to come to life and get lost in your town, would people’s hair stand on end when they saw it? Would they stop whatever they were doing and run from it? Would it cause them to fear for their lives? How do you make…
There are enough rules about when to use a comma and when not to use one to drive any normal person insane. Have you ever noticed that sometimes there are commas between adjectives and sometimes there aren’t? Why is that? Order of AdjectivesDid you know that there is an order in which adjectives should appear?…
Who doesn’t like music? To say music is powerful is the understatement of the millennium. It activates our brain in ways nothing else can. It makes us feel emotions and remember times gone by. We know thousands—if not tens of thousands—of songs, but we think nothing of it. Music is an alphabet of twelve notes…
I started writing when I was a kid. I always loved to read and would get lost in worlds that were so vivid in my imagination. When I was in fourth grade, I entered a young writers’ conference and placed second. After that, I started writing short stories in spiral notebooks and eventually had too…
