Carl Marchese's Page

Under The Dome – Book Review

What happens when Stephen King, the 800-pound gorilla of horror, writes an over one thousand page novel? It works: He validates his weight; and even throws it around, a little.

Afterburn SF November 2009 Issue

The November 2009 issue of Afterburn SF is complete and posted online.

Horror Bound Online Magazine

Horror Bound Magazine, not only offers free short fiction by some of today's hottest writers but also interviews with your favorite authors, poetry, and book reviews.

Providence, 1986

Providence, 1986 Wayne Allen Sallee 28 November 2009

I have a road trip, of sorts, ahead of me in a few hours. A zig-zag across the transit system of Chicago. I’m heading up north, but first I have to take the 55th Street bus to an artist friend’s place and drop off a few autographed books. There is [...]

The Ritual of Fine-Tuning My Writing

Most writers I know have rituals. These run the gamut from adjusting their desks a certain way to writing by candlelight to setting a glass of perfectly innocent booze on fire before each writing project as a sacrifice to the Writing Ancestors. They may sound silly, or wasteful (perfectly good booze, after all) or unintuitive, [...]

Thanksgiving

Friends and relatives around he world sing the same song: “We don’t have Thanksgiving here.” Here is New Zealand, South Africa, England, Israel…and on and on. This year, because we are down to three of us—my guardian angel/chef and one friend who lives alone—I stopped to think about what that means.

“We don’t have [...]

In love as it is in war

I promised some friends (and students) that I would talk about how one goes about writing a successful sex scene.  There are a lot of theories about this–one school, for example,  believes that a successful sex scene should titillate. (Do they believe a successful dinner scene should make you hungry? I write my dinner scenes [...]

“genre vs literary” in the days of the Technorenaissance

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I was hanging out in a writer’s forum and came across the age-old question of how do you define genre and literary? which always turns into genre vs literary: genre types bash the literati for lacking plot (which is absurd), while the literati bash the genre-ati for lacking everything else (equally absurd).

One person [...]