Writing and book holidays observed in October, as autumn deepens. Every literary celebration, author day, and reading observance falling in October, each marked with an essay.
Fantasy FictionLe Guin grew up in a house of anthropologists and applied their central question to places that did not exist: not what a society has, but why it arranged itself that way. That order of operations is why her worlds…
ComedyWilde produced a body of work you could read in a fortnight, and he is quoted more than writers with forty books. The reason is mechanical, not mystical: he built the surprise into the sentence instead of the paragraph, and…
Gothic HorrorRice wrote 37 books that sold over 150 million copies, and the reason she matters to anyone studying craft comes down to one decision made in a short story around 1968. She moved the camera and gave the vampire the…
AdaptationIn 1954, Kirk Douglas brought Homer's wandering hero to the big screen, putting the Odyssey in front of a mass audience. A look at one of the oldest stories ever told and why it has survived for millennia.
OctoberFrank Herbert's Dune was rejected by 20+ publishers before an auto-repair-manual company printed it. On his birthday, a look at the worldbuilding that makes Dune the genre's gold standard, and what it teaches anyone building a universe.
OctoberThe National Day on Writing celebrates why and how people write, under the hashtag #WhyIWrite. My answer is simple: writing is something you do, not something you discuss. A look at the work behind the impulse.
AmericaColumbus Day is the second Monday in October. An honest look at the Columbian Exchange, the collision of two worlds, and a book that explains it.
Book WritingBanned Books Week is late September. A personal story about being denied The Grapes of Wrath in high school, and why the fight over reading still matters.
Grammar & SpellingDictionary Day is October 16. Why a misunderstood word corrupts everything you read, the value of looking words up, and what Weird Al's Word Crimes gets right.
Character DevelopmentHalloween gives you permission to become someone else for a few hours. Writing does the same thing, except the transformation lasts longer. Here's how.
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