Emily Howitt

Writing a novel is hard. Like really hard. Those things are long. And they have so many words. And pages. And the characters keep wanting to go off and do things that aren’t in the outline. Stupid characters. But you have to let them breathe, because, like, otherwise they’ll commit fictional suicide or start murdering all your other characters and then everyone is just dead at the end of your story. Which, I guess, sort of worked for Hamlet. But ideally you want some people left alive at the end. Anyway, tangent over. Let’s get to the post. Ever wonder the different ways of skinning a cat? Er…I mean novel. Where did that expression come from anyway? Why are there people who want to skin a cat? And why do they need multiple ways to exact the skinning of a cat???? Moving on. There are different ways to write a novel. I’m going to talk about them in this blog post. They can also apply to short stories, or novellas, or any other length of writing. They could even work for non-fiction....

This is a flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig's blog,  terribleminds . I hope you enjoy. Insomnia. The word sears my brain like a hot iron. Insomnia. Insomnia. Insomnia. So very, very close to insane. Insanity. That is where I feel—where I fear—I am heading. Insomnia to insanity. Insanity to—I don’t know. I’m not making sense, I think, as I write in my journal. I’m not making sense at all. I’m not making sense at all. I’m just writing words that are meaningless that mean nothing and saying the same thing over and over again and again trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. What the hell the man in the crisp black suit did to me. I set the journal down beside me and glance over at the bedside clock. Bright red numbers stare back at me. 4:00 A.M. Four in the morning. The last time it was four in the morning I witnessed a murder. I was walking down a dark alley late at night. Or early morning to some people, but for me, it was still night. I was w...

You may or may not have noticed but I haven’t posted on this blog in a while. I have a confession to make. I’ve been writing blog posts in secret. Not necessarily beginning that way. I always thought while I was writing them that I should post them to my blog. But then I don’t. Partly because I’m working more hours now. Mostly because I’m scared of how they’ll be received. They’re a bit inflammatory. Controversial. There’s cursing in them. There’s too much of my feelings in them. They’re not safe. But then I thought: if only I could put these posts into fiction somehow, then I could just say it was the characters thinking these things, and not me. Which in turn made me think: are we hiding behind our fiction?   I don’t think expressing secret opinions is the main reason people write fiction. It’s not the main reason I write. But it does make me wonder if it’s a part of it. Even if the story you’re writing is completely fabricated, some of you is going to go into it. Some of ...

I decided to participate in flash fiction challenge this week from Chuck Wendig's blog Terribleminds , and chose the title "Blondie's Southern Rabbit." Enjoy. Jack drove past the diner slowly, staring longingly. He had been wanting to try Blondie’s Southern Rabbit for a long time now. Almost a year. It was a little hole in the wall trucker stop near a hole in the wall, town, and they didn’t take very kindly to outsiders. They liked to stay within their own community, and anyone who did happen to venture into the diner, while, they were just never seen again. Probably because they went back to wherever they came from, Jack thought, people liked to make things bigger than they were. Even so, it was enough to scare off most people, including Jack, until he just couldn’t take it any longer. Their rabbit stew was supposed to be the best around, and he just had to try some of it himself. It might seem odd that Jack was so fixated on rabbit stew. He even considered m...

Writers are a fickle bunch of creatures. Sometimes it seems like everything has to be just right, or we can’t possibly write. If the sun is at a weird angle, no. If it’s an odd numbered day, no. And heaven forbid, we run out of coffee. The wondrous nectar of life. We can’t possibly write without the nectar of life. I kid, of course, but sometimes writers fall into traps. The trap of superstition. The trap of fear; that you’ll suddenly just forget how to write. The trap of trying to write two thousand words every day when really all you want to do is crawl under that rock and pretend like the world doesn’t exist. Or maybe you’re stuck and you just can’t bring yourself to write another agonizingly painful word that makes you want to set what you wrote on fire, only you can’t because we now write with these high tech newfangled things called laptops. And you can’t burn your laptop, because, like, it cost a lot of money. Especially if it’s Apple. Because Apple thinks they can charge r...

The Nightlife: New York, by Travis Luedke, is actually pretty good. I say “actually” because I wasn’t really sure what kind of book I was getting into. It warns of graphic sex scenes and I think violence in the beginning, so I wasn’t sure if this was going to just be sex, sex, sex, and basically an erotica novel. Not that I read that many of those. I feel like romance and erotic novels are always blurring the line anyway. Some romance novels I’ve read, like Outlander , can get quite graphic in their sex scenes. Some of the sex scenes in the Nightlife are indeed graphic, but they are usually fleeting. They don’t take up pages and pages, and there is definitely more to the book than just sex. That being said, the book does primarily focus on Michelle and Aaron. Michelle is a vampire, which I kind of like. It’s not the typical Twilight kind of vampire. It’s a different take on vampirism. When a vampire of her kind turns someone, that person becomes their slave, and bound to them by b...

Vulnerability. Capable of being physically or emotionally wounded (Merriam Webster).  Being vulnerable has negative connotations in our society. Even the definition is negative. Who wants to be wounded emotionally or physically? The problem is, if we’re cut off from being hurt, sometimes that can be more damaging then the risks we take when we’re vulnerable. We don’t always realize it, but we make ourselves vulnerable all the time. Whenever we let someone in, we’re being vulnerable. Whenever we tell someone something intimate, or about something that matters to us, we’re being vulnerable. We’re letting other people in who may not want to be let in. We don’t know how they will react. They could react extremely negatively, yet we’re told to share our feelings with others and not to keep things bottled up. But being vulnerable still seems like a bad thing. Like we’re in a weakened position if we admit that we are vulnerable. A while ago, I wrote this post  about how I ...