10 Songs About Writing

By Ed Sikov

Songwriters spend a great deal of time and energy composing songs about love and loss and regret and d-i-v-o-r-c-e and what prompted Billy Joe McAllister to jump off the Tallahatchee Bridge. All well and good. But how many songs are devoted to writing? Professions generally don’t serve as the subject of music. (“Convoy” (trucking), “Casey Jones” (locomotive operation), and “Good Lovin’” (internal medicine) are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Still, I came up with more titles than I imagined I would. With one exception: I’ve steered clear of songs about songwriting. Maybe I just couldn’t bring myself to include Barry Manilow’s execrable “I Write the Songs”. The songs I’ve chosen are ones that speak to us as writers; they’re about the process of laying down words and the words’ effect on the folks who read them.

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Best Books of 2012: Friends of LitReactor Edition with Irvine Welsh, Jack Ketchum, Douglas Coupland, and Stephen Graham Jones

By Joshua Chaplinsky

We’ve already given you our staff picks for the Best Books of 2012, as well as a supplemental Genre Edition for the geeks, but who the hell cares what a bunch of nobodies have to say when some real, live authors are willing to tell us what to read?

Seriously, though, we’ve had the privilege of making friends with some amazing writers, and we figured what better way to close out the year than with a special Friends of LitReactor best of list. So we reached out like a grubby urchin begging for alms and they were kind enough to share their favorite reads of 2012 with us.

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What Scares You? 30 Terrifying Horror Stories Straight Out Of Your Worst Nightmares

By Kimberly Turner

Fear is subjective and personal. The things that haunt your nightmares and the things that cause my breath to quicken—they are probably not the same. Some people are hit hardest by subtle seeping dread and things unseen. Others, by in-your-face gore and guts. Still others, by the darkness of the human psyche.

That’s why making a definitive list of the most terrifying books of all time (which I originally set out to do) is a futile endeavor. Instead, I invite you to stroll down phobia lane until we find the horror that pushes your buttons, poking around until we discover a soft spot that makes you cringe. Because that’s what Halloween is all about.

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Book vs. Film: Cloud Atlas

Stories cross mediums like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a story.

By Joshua Chaplinsky

Back in July when the glorious six-minute trailer for Cloud Atlas came out, I wrote about how I had written about the unfilmable nature of the source material back in February. In said article– which I had initially planned for LitReactor’s October 2011 launch, but postponed so I could wait for a producer’s quote which never materialized– I promised to revisit the matter once the film had been released. It was set to hit theaters this past October, which it did, but luckily I got to see the film early, at a Fantastic Fest secret screening this past September. At the time of this reading (but not of this writing), some of you have no doubt seen the film, and the column idea I hatched over a year ago has finally come to fruition. It will now spread across the consciousness of the internet, and be transformed in the minds of those who read it, before being passed on in some form or another, verbal or electronic, while hopefully retaining its true essence.

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Top 10 YA Books That Should Be Adapted for Film

  By Sarah Pitre

There seems to be a flaw in the human brain when it comes to film adaptations of books. I say this because movies rarely, if ever, turn out to be better than their literary source material. And yet, every time I finish an amazing novel, I immediately start praying that it will be made into a film. Seriously, brain, what’s up with that?

Well, when it comes to love, I guess I can’t be rational, and I’m smitten with these books. The idea of getting to experience them again, in a different if inferior way, still ridiculously excites me, so Hollywood, I hope you’re paying attention.

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Why Even Ayn Rand Can Teach You Something About Writing

  By Phil Jourdan

Here is a beautiful coincidence: my eBook version of Ayn Rand’s lectures on The Art of Fiction has a typo that tells you everything you could wish to know about what makes a poor writer. See if you can spot it:

Literature is an art form which uses language as its toot.

Language as flatulence. Literature that relies on a lot of hot air being blown in all directions.

Ayn Rand is the author of Atlas Shrugged, one of the most embarrassing novels to be caught reading. She also gave us The Fountainhead, the most elaborate apology for fascism ever written. While I am indifferent to Atlas Shrugged (it is Objectively Bad), I have a fondness for The Fountainhead because it’s so sweetly unaware of what it represents. That’s my disclaimer. I’m not a fan of Ayn Rand’s novels, and her politics equate to pissing in public because I goddamn built this street in the first place, plebs.

But Ayn Rand does have something to teach us. Let’s focus on the first two chapters of The Art of Fiction.

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Ten Authors Who Write Great Dialogue

Elmore Leonard

By Meredith Borders

Dialogue is a tricky beast. There are so many writers who can craft stunning descriptive passages, entirely believable characters and heart-pounding action sequences, but whose dialogue falls flat and pale. Here are ten authors who can create a conversation that crackles.

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The Long & Winding Road: Part III – Talking To Agents

Recap: The Long & Winding Road is a multi-part essay about my endeavors to get an agent and publish my first novel. Part I discussed writing my first novel and seeking representation, Part II discussed “revision hell.”

By Kelly Thompson

In my experience thus far, I found nothing is truer of publishing than the age-old adage of “hurry up and wait.”  And never was it more apt for me than at this stage of my quest for an agent.

After The Girl Who Would Be King was forwarded to my friend’s agent connection, things started happening very quickly. First and foremost, I almost fell off my chair when I realized which agency it was (heretofore referred to as “Top Agency”). Then I did fall off my chair when I learned the agent had asked for my phone number so that we could speak about the book. We spoke on the phone that evening for perhaps twenty minutes. He obviously hadn’t finished reading it, but he was very interested. He asked a lot of wonderful questions both about me and about the book, and it was the single greatest phone call of my life up until that point. Even more amazing was that this had all happened in the span of a few hours. Well, multiple years and a few hours. But who’s counting?! It was incredible.

The next day I got on a plane for a visit home with my family, and because I was already unemployed, I extended the trip so that I could stay and help out while my father was laid up after surgery. Waiting, especially while “on vacation,” was brutal.

Everything up to this point had happened so suddenly, but now I somehow knew I had to settle in for the long wait.

However, about a week into my waiting, I got an email from the agency that had re-requested the full manuscript back in October, which we’ll now call “Dark Horse Agency” (not because they were in any way lesser than “Top Agency”, but because they came out of nowhere). “Dark Horse Agency” was loving the book. They hadn’t finished it yet either, but they wanted to let me know that they were interested and they’d be getting back to me within a few weeks.

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Ten Gay Men’s Novels You Should Already Have Read If You Consider Yourself Even Semi-Literate

  By Ed Sikov

We’re glibbets, which rhymes with the froggy ribbets, and we have a literary canon that most of you won’t read. What’s a glibbet? A glibbet is a member of the GLBT community: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender. Like the jingle for the old Women’s Lib-co-opting Virginia Slims “fags” (as the Brits call them), “we’ve got our own set of classics now, baby – we’ve come a long, long way.” The trouble is, straight people won’t be caught dead taking any self-segregated GLBT lit college classes, and after you graduate, it’s hopeless. You people generally have to be shamed into reading gay-themed books by aren’t-afraid-to-be-assholes-about-it assholes like me, who enjoy pointing out that while we glibbets read the work of straight writers all the time, you straight folks – particularly men – generally continue on your merry way without bothering to read our work at all.

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Bangs, Whimpers, and Apes: The Top 10 World-Ending Events In Science Fiction

 By Jon Korn

The world ends all the time in science fiction. And, depending on which conspiracy sites you’ve been reading, it might be Doomsday for real this year. After all, it’s not often that the Mayans and Roland Emmerich agree on something.

So, in honor of 2012 possibly (probably?) being the last year of history, it only seems right to count down my top ten favorite world-ending events in sci-fi. So go grab some dehydrated water and a grip of shotgun shells. I’ll meet you in the storm cellar.

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