The mountains of rural Georgia will never be the same after a series of viscous murders rock the area to its core. Not only does the killer target children, his gruesome murders are designed to inflict the ultimate agony upon their parents and to instill extreme terror within the small communities.

 Last month I entered a DVD giveaway on a blog just for a chance to win the Heathcliff: King of the Beasts. Luckily, I won the contest and I have been spending my free time watching new and old cartoons. Even though I was only a three-year-old when Heathcliff originally aired back in 1984, I vaguely remember the show, but for some odd reason I do remember the catch theme song.

Heathcliff is based on the comic strip by the late George Gately. Prior to the 1984, Heathcliff appeared in the 1980 series Heathcliff and the Dingbats, which last two years and 25 episodes. When Heathcliff returned to TV in 1984, it followed a similar format with each episode having two 11 segments, followed by a short ending segment with Heathcliff giving good pet advise to kids. The old Dingbats segment was replaced with The Catillac Cats, which was created by Jean Chalopin, Bruno Bianchi.

TITLE: Star Wars: Invasion Volume 3- Revelations
PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics
RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2012
ISBN: 9781595828828 
AUTHOR: Tom Taylor
CONTRIBUTORS: Chris Scalf; Colin Wilson; and Wes Dzioba 

. . . And the walls came a tumbling down

I’m headed into a new phase of my life. I’m transitioning from unpublished author begging agents to read a few chapters to hot, middle aged mama (hot is an overstatement of my general aura), boldly self publishing my novels for all the world to see.

I have spent the last ten years working the agent/publisher gig; writing, querying,  attending conferences, reworking my synopsis, posting & reading at publisher and industry sites and generally immersing myself in an industry that equally prizes innovation, cherishes imitation (read sequels), is entirely subjective and seems unable to  understand that their world is on the cusp of a change so large that they’d best soon schedule a meeting to address that change or someone may escort them out of their office when the rent goes unpaid.

Truthfully, I’m a little pissed off. It’s like a spent a boatload of time cataloging 8 tracks to find out the players are no longer made. I’ve been following this business for a quite some time, I knew change was coming. I remember when I found out about the first ereader and thought to myself, change is coming. But who knew when? And who could have predicted the depth and breadth and speed with which a centuries old industry was turned on its head.

A while back, I wrote a book called A Song After Dark. I remember thinking it was crap when I finished it, and I was afraid to show it to anyone. Truthfully, I’m very harsh on my writing, and most of the time I think it’s terrible. It takes someone whose opinion I trust to look at my writing and tell me that it’s pretty good.

That wasn’t my first novel, more like my eighth. But the situation hasn’t changed. It rides ever onward, morphing and reappearing with each book and story. I’ve learned, after almost a decade, to have fun with it, to love that part of writing—journeying into the unknown, into your own subconscious. It’s scary at times, but it’s always rewarding.

Luckily, I have my girlfriend, whose opinion I trust and who encourages me endlessly. I know now that looking at one’s own writing and being unsure of whether it’s good or not is just part of the game. The same goes for those times during writing a novel when you wonder whether you’ve taken the right path or not, when ask yourself where the hell all this nonsense is going, when you doubt whether you’ll ever finish the thing at all. It’s all a natural part of the process. Learn to love it, to let the third eye do what it will. Then, when the story has finally laid itself upon the page, clean up the mess and turn that coal into a diamond.

Letting Your Story Flow

by Brian Beam

Like many writers, I have had my share of discarded manuscripts, some only paragraphs, others dozens of pages. So many hours, so many ideas, all thrown away.

At the height of my frustration at not being able to finish a complete fantasy novel, I knew I had to try something else. I wanted to identify that special “something” which would allow me to fulfill my dream of finishing my first novel. Through articles about writing, interviews with my favorite authors, and instructional books, I found that a common theme was outlining your story. 

So, I started outlining. However, instead of discarding my manuscripts, I found that I couldn’t even start one to discard. It made no sense to me. The story was right there on the page. All I had to do was expand it into narrative. It should have been easy. For me, though, easy as it may have been, the inspiration to write those stories evaporated.

After taking a step back, I realized that I felt too constrained with my outlines. I had written out the flow of the stories, but then I felt stuck to that flow. Getting new ideas meant going back through my outline to figure out exactly how that new idea would affect the rest of the rest of the plot points. It felt tedious. I kind of gave up.

After a few years of minimal writing, I got a general idea for a series of short stories. It was the first idea I had been excited about in so long that I just had to put it to paper. I forewent the outlining, just wanting to enjoy the feeling of writing again. I was only a couple pages in when I realized that my first idea was not going to work as a short story. My new plan was to expand my story into a trilogy of novellas.