Robert G. Male

Horror Bound Online Magazine

Ray Bradbury on Writing Persistently

Dark Delicacies 15th Anniversary Celebration

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 [...]