Six years ago, I did a blog post about William Peter Blatty, the writer who provided one of the funniest movies ever made (A Shot in the Dark) and one of the scariest movies ever made (The Exorcist). I was mostly interested in the fact that Blatty had these two sides to his writing ability …
Continue reading Frank Peretti and William Peter Blatty: A Compare and Contrast
November is coming up, which means NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month) has come again. In this an annual event, you take a month to write a story that’s 50,000 words long, the equivalent of a good-sized novel. This is a big task, so here are five strategies that may help you get through NaNoWriMo: …
I review Christian books, mostly nonfiction ones but I do get a Christian Fiction novel or two each month. Occasionally I'll get one that I enjoy, and frequently I'll give 3 or 4 stars just because I know the author means well and it's not too terrible. However, most of the time I'm just not …
Continue reading The Soft Critique (Building a Better Christian Novel Pt 2)
This October, I will be releasing Tapes from the Crawlspace, a series of short stories over YouTube, one story for each day leading up to Halloween. To give you an idea what this series will be like, I've written a self-interview, which I'm providing for blog followers and anyone else who may be interested: How …
Continue reading Tapes from the Crawlspace: An Audio Project
This week, I'm going to do something a bit different from my usual blog post routine, and do something humorous. Why? Partly because we're all in a tough time right now and we could always use a few more laughs. Also because this humorous thing connects to topics I've discussed frequently in my regular posts: …
Continue reading The Bad Book Blurb Contest: Worst Descriptions of Classic Spec Fic Books
I enjoy a a good parody of fantasy or sci-fi almost as much as I enjoy the genre itself. Recently I took part in a contest created by writer Jeff Mach (author of various funny short stories) to name the worst scifi/fantasy tropes so he could create stories based on each one. I read Robert …
Continue reading A Great Satirical Short Story from Jeff Mach
Here's where you can read part 1 in this blog series I noted last week that some film critics and filmmakers (particularly Paul Schrader and Roy Anker) have argued you really can't show divine encounters (God or angels literally showing up in a movie) without it seeming cheesy. This argument has big ramifications for Christians …
Continue reading Play Along with the Joke (God in Film Pt 2)
Some time ago I wrote an article for The Odyssey Online which were published and then accidentally taken down due to server issues. I haven't been able to get those articles live again on the Odyssey's site, but I was able to recreate them and post the new versions on my Steemit account. Here's one …
As the main character learns in this new Whales Speaking Yiddish episode, it can take a while to adjust to prison life: https://tapas.io/episode/1252368
What happens when a UFO arrives with the one request you didn't expect? In this Whales Speaking Yiddish episode, a man minding his own business has to deal with that odd situation: https://tapas.io/episode/1252371
G. Connor Salter 