To refresh my memory on the submission guidelines, I thumbed through my 2000 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market. (I don’t have a 2009 copy or 2008 or 2005, or anything else from this millennium for that matter. I have …

That’s a good question. Generally, I have always tried to publish my fiction stories in literary magazines. To identify likely candidates, I relied on the Writer’s Market and the Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, two books that catalog …

You are about to read an online article by an Unpublished Guy, Fiction Novels, a Profile of Italo Calvino. You crouch in front of the computer screen and use the pointing device to select the Read More link. The site …

The Difference Between Creative Writing and Technical Writing – Le Pigeon

What do you think a pigeon would taste like? Would it be dark meat or white meat? Do they fly as much as ducks or geese? That would mean …

When Vladimir Nabokov was asked whether he had read Franz Kafka’s The Trial before writing Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov insisted that he had not. Having read Invitation to a Beheading, the basic premise is so similar—a man awaits execution …

The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point …

I have read stories that have started off rather badly in my opinion with an extended physical description of the main character. In some cases, every new character is introduced with an extended physical description. Of course, these descriptions include …

Way back when I was more earnestly learning the craft of writing, I was reading through several different books on writing fiction. Almost immediately, I felt that I was reading the same book over and over again. It was if …

While most of the rejections I ever received were of the form letter variety (“not at this time” or “does not fit our current needs”), I did get two that encouraged me to keep trying, perhaps for longer than was …