Nathan Bransford - The Forums

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS.

I write for roughly the same reason I read. To understand. The world is full of mystery. There are some things that make sense, but then there are inexplicable moments of joy and pain, and even if I'll never really be able to understand these moments, I feel compelled to try. Usually I write with qu...

What about thoughts on titles that come from the book? (Someone just mentioned this.) I find it really hard to title a story or novel anything but a phrase or line from within the work, but I know this irritates some people. They get to the phrase in the story and it pulls them out. I also refer to ...

I'll appreciate them wherever they are!

A Room by the Sea
Literary Fiction

A Room by the Sea Literary Fiction The winter before I turned ten, when the days were short and bruise-like and the city was constantly tearing down the beaver dam behind our trailer park, I saw dead birds everywhere, lying in shadows and at the edges of woods. Beautiful black birds with oil-slicked...

Because of where I was reading through these alternate titles, I was trying not to laugh out loud. The James Joyce made tears run from the corners of my eyes. I actually had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud, and I mean loud . Same here. I was at Starbucks where a studen...

PaulWoodlin wrote:Determined by how often I reread them:

Dead: Jane Austen, Cervantes, Charlotte Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien, Lewis.

Alive: Stephen Donaldson, Lane Robins, Joss Whedon, Dan Simmons, Jeanette Winterson

I love Jeanette Winterson!

Just read REALITY HUNGER by David Shields. Everyone's buzzing about it, but no one else I know has read it. For what it's worth, I didn't agree with everything he writes about fiction, but I still appreciated it.

Mine: To me, death would be a welcome visitor. This one grabs me. It's short, unexpected, and packed with voice. The sentences that follow can go dark or darkly funny, which to me is promising. It immediately brings up questions, and finding answers to interesting questions is part of why I keep re...

Ha! I missed that. That's awesome.

I want this.
http://www.moleskines.com/moleskine-book-journal.html

I just found out I'm going to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer's Conference in Denver this September. Turns out I'm a finalist in the writing competition in the Fantasy category. Woohoo!! The final judge is a certain well-known, well-respected local agent. The winner will be announced at the dinne...

That's an interesting take. I probably didn't provide a very wide sampling of what's in the book, just some points I found interesting. He also makes a case for plagiarism and why it's not so bad and another for blurring genres instead of sticking with traditional novels and stories. Mostly, at leas...

Okay, how about a snippet or two to whet your appetite? "The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meage...