Emily Howitt

I can’t blog. I’ve been pretending for far too long now. I try to write posts related to my books. Or I try to write a post on a happy, positive topic. But I can’t. I can’t do it. When I try to do it, it comes out forced. I don’t think it’s too horrible. I still think it’s okay. It just doesn’t seem, I hesitate to say great, but it just seems off, you know? Like a part of me is missing. Blogging is hard for me. I never really got a handle on what the hell I’m supposed to blog about. Fiction is easy. Fiction comes straight from my heart and even if I’m not feeling particularly “inspired” I can still get into it pretty easily. But I can’t do that with blogging. That doesn’t work. I think of ideas and then they seem stale when I go to write them, or I can’t think of anything to say. And when the words do flow, when I do get an idea for a post, it’s sad. It’s about depression. It’s unhappy. It’s not related to my books. Nor really. And every post seems to be negative, and I don’t ...

So Halloween is on Monday and it made me think about humans and why we enjoy scaring ourselves so much. Because that’s basically what Halloween is about. It might have started off as scaring away the undead, but now it’s just about scaring the living. Well, and candy. Lots of candy. Like so much candy that we could probably build a wall. But then people would just eat the wall, and we’d probably all get sick. And the exercise would have been pointless…but why am I talking about walls? Back to fear. We like to be scared. Why? Probably because we get a high off of it. That’s why people jump out of perfectly working airplanes. To get a high. Because apparently life isn’t exciting enough for them. Or they couldn’t find any cocaine that day (joking. Drugs are bad, children). In short, it’s fun. It’s fun to dress up in silly costumes and try to scare each other in a safe environment. That’s a safe kind of fear. Like watching a horror movie. You get to live vicariously through the charac...

Cat Grant is honestly my favourite character on Supergirl. She might be a little bit crazy, insane, and not quite possible in the real world, but everything she stands for and represents is so inspiring. Especially to creatives like me and hopefully you, who are trying to find our place in this world and carve out our own little section of it to call our own. If you don’t watch Supergirl, then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but the things I’m going to talk about in this post can still apply to you, even if you’re not a creative (which I think we all are at some level, but that’s another post). Warning: there are a few spoilers coming up (but not too many) if you haven’t watched the first episode of season 2 of Supergirl yet. Also, I haven’t watched the second episode, so please refrain from saying anything about it. Thank you. At the end of last season on Supergirl, Kara (a.k.a Supergirl) is given the opportunity to pick a new job by Cat Grant, any job she w...

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...