I have recently volunteered to be the first reader for The Crypt Magazine, an online magazine of dark fiction and poetry published by the Ghost Orchid Press. I've often read and critiqued my fellow writers' work, I've been a beta reader and critique partner, but I've never been a slusher. I think it requires a …
White whale has landed
Those outside the querying trenches often mock those inside them for comparing the process of researching on-line, writing a letter and hitting “send” to the experience of sitting in a freezing hole in the ground while shells explode above your head. However, in my humble opinion, those who’d never tried to run the minefield of …
Colombina, or how a story wove itself from art and mist
Sometimes a story appears whole and perfect in a writer's head and all they have to do is write it down. Unfortunately, that almost never happens to me, and Colombina is no exception. Writing it was a meandering process of trial and error, trying to fit different pieces together without a clear image of the …
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The Book
Let’s make this clear: The Book is not the first novel I’ve written nor it is the last, so all the drama connected with it is purely subjective. But it is my current project and it has taken me on a roller coaster ride of hope and disappointment of epic proportions (subjective, remember!). I’ve finished …
Suck it up, brain weasels!
2020 has been a good year. Well, perhaps that's an overstatement. 2020 has been a terrible year in so many ways. The pandemic, the lockdown, the fear, the crumbling economy and the horrors of homeschooling. It was a tough year to live through and I'm glad it's almost over. And yet... it's been a good …
Jelena Dunato 