Emily Howitt

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 ...

So I’ll be honest about this book, it’s kind of sad. Not sad in a bad way, but if you’re looking for an uplifting romance, you might want to pick something a little lighter. Like this . Or this . That being said, it is a good book, and I did enjoy it, and there are parts that can even be considered happy. Just keep an eye out for when the sad bits strike. When I first started reading On Mystic Lake by Kristin Hannah, I thought it was going to be a cliché. I don’t know why I have a tendency to sometimes judge a book so harshly after reading the first chapter or two. But I thought that this was going to go something like: husband demands divorce. Woman is devastated then finds inner strength without man. Then some crap about independence. And while this book does flirt with that, it’s much more than a cliché. It’s a fully developed novel. It shows us heartbreak and healing. And even though it’s not the typical novel I read, I enjoyed having read it, and learning about the characters...

Today is my birthday, so I decided to be completely original and tell you 23 things I learned in 23 years. Because no one has ever done that. Ever. Since the beginning of time, which started, like, ten years ago? When the internet was born? I’m rambling. Why don’t you just start reading the list? No, really, you should read it now. Why are you still reading this? Why am I still writing it? Anyway, here you go: Humour is necessary if you want to survive life. Education (like high school, college, university) is a good thing to have. It can be a helpful thing. You can learn many interesting and useful things. But it doesn’t necessarily teach you how to function in the world outside of academia. Books are amazing. Writing is my passion, and passions should be followed, as should dreams. There will be days in life that are very dark. But they do not have to be forever. It’s important to take care of yourself. Whether that’s physically, or emotionally. Failure is not absolute...