Derek Gunn's Page

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.

Ray Bradbury on Writing Persistently

Nothing else needs to be said. If you're a writer, this should keep you inspired throughout your career. From Ray Bradbury's mouth to your ears, invaluable advice to the writer ...

Dark Delicacies 15th Anniversary Celebration

On Thursday December 3rd Dark Delicacies will be celebrating its 15th Anniversary. Opening on December 3rd of 1994, Dark Delicacies was the only all-horror book and gift store in the United States.

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 [...]

FORENSICS 123: CRIME SCENE MISINTERPRETATIONS

There are many things that, when misinterpreted, can result in inaccurate crime scene investigation results. The following describe some potential misinterpretations.

Body positions:

Bodies burned in a fire often assume a pose commonly referred to as a “pugilist position.” Their hands are clenched and raised like those of a prize fighter. This could be [...]