Anna Holloway: Don't Forget to Wave

Anna Holloway spent her teaching and administrative career of forty-six years all at one HBCU (historically black college and university). I have written about my experience, especially the early part, and I’m still in the process of learning more about black people’s experiences. Originally from the Midwest and now in the South and the mother of two interracial sons, Anna writes about her life-changing experiences as a white instructor at a black college during the time of the Vietnam War, voting reforms, and public-school integration. 

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

Be Sure to Wave: An Interracial Family in Rural Georgia takes place 1978-92 in very rural Macon County. We experienced a gunshot in our house and a local church reacting against our three-year-old son's attending Sunday school, and we were even touched by the KKK, it appeared. But we came to like most of our neighbors, our two sons loved being in the country, and we lived seeing the wildlife. We did work and took the boys to school in Fort Valley.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

In my memoirs and many of my poems so far, I reflect on real-life differences between being a Southerner and being a Midwesterner, and this is through my lens of coming from the Midwest in 1968 to teach at Fort Valley State, where I spent my career of 46 years.

Motivational Monday: From the Brain to the Heart

[Link] 5 Great Claustrophobic Crime Novels

by Matthew F. Jones

I’m not sure that the term claustrophobic crime novel is a genre unto itself. If it isn’t it should be. Claustrophobia, whether of the physical or mental kind, is the engine that drives some of our best novels. Thrillers and crime novels in particular.  This is because every well-done claustrophobic novel is also a psychological character study told entirely or, almost entirely, from the point of view of the novel’s protagonist; and being inside someone’s mind in a claustrophobic situation – whether of their own making or created from external circumstances – can’t help but be thrilling, tense and unpredictable. In several of my own novels I have found it most effective to write from a single character’s perspective – whether from the first or third person point of view. What’s interesting for me as their conduit in a sense is to observe through a character’s mind how they will react as the situations/encounters I put them in become tenser and/or more fraught. Who of us can say who we really are – the heroic, or anyway upright, person we want to believe we are or something less – until we’re in a crisis situation? That unpredictability and sense of a protagonist revealing to me their truest nature at the same time that I am writing the story that is forcing them to do so, for me defines the art of writing and is what makes doing it exciting.

Read the full article: https://crimereads.com/5-great-claustrophobic-crime-novels/

Horrific Scribes Presents: Rulemakers and Rulebreakers: 26 Works of Order and Chaos (Horrific Scribes Anthologies)

Horrific Scribes Presents: Rulemakers and Rulebreakers: 26 Works of Order and Chaos 

by L. Andrew Cooper, H.J. Dutton, Sarina Dorie, et al

Format: Kindle 

Which is more terrifying, the imposition of order that might involve stifling limitations and repugnant values, or spiraling into chaos as order splinters or disappears? The 26 authors in Horrific Scribes Presents: Rulemakers and Rulebreakers have 26 answers, each with the potential to shatter you. Prepare for works by Sam Arlington, Raymond Brunell, Harley Carnell, Emmie Christie, Nicholas De Marino, Sarina Dorie, Eric Fomley, Douglas Ford, Matt Hollingsworth, Douglas Kolacki, Christine Lajewski, Devin James Leonard, E.J. LeRoy, Susan L. Lin, Mavrik McMeekan, Jason Frederick Myers, Lena Ng, Dimitry Partsi, Nick Porisch, Nilay Kumar Sarker, C.M. Saunders, Briar Shannon, Steve Toase, Mark Towse, Fendy S. Tulodo, and Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

"A terrific mix of 26 short stories, all on the theme of rule use and abuse. They're all engrossing, though some in that peering-between-your-fingers way, and a few are downright disturbing. I particularly liked the banality of "The Basement" and the bizarre "The Reflection's Strike, " but my favourite was the possession story "No Vacancy." A great anthology, just right if you want to have disturbed sleep!"

          --L.N. Hunter, author of The Feather and the Lamp

Available on Amazon

Open Skies (new poem)

From my upcoming second volume of poetry, Brunch with the Obelisk.

J. Brice Odom: Becoming an Older Kid

J. Brice Odom was born and raised in the great state of Georgia and now resides in the beautiful city of Macon. Since he was a young child, he has enjoyed creating stories and investigating history. He has been writing stories of all shapes and sizes since he was in elementary school. As he has gone through high school and college, and out of and back into a teaching career, that desire to create worlds of words and explore the ideas of literature and history remains undiminished. He has been telling stories since he was a young kid and intends to be telling stories as he becomes an older and older kid.  

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

My most recent book is hard boiled detective novel called Moonlight in the Tombstones. I tried to channel the feeling of the old film noir stories like The Maltese Falcon. The detective is wearing a fedora, the dialogue is often quick and sarcastic, there is a beautiful woman who we have no clue whose side she is really on, plenty of twists and turns, and a couple good gun fights along the way! 

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

I am a pretty eclectic writer in terms of genre. I have a detective novel, fantasy novel, short story collection that has various genres, a little poetry book, and a history book. Ultimately, what I like to usually say is most often I write of the fantastic, whether that is fantasy, science fiction, southern lit, or any other genre.

What hapened in your life that prompted you to become a writer? 

I can't think of a time I have not enjoyed telling stories. I remember, when I was little, my Granny typing as I told her a story about a lava monster on her typewriter, and then putting it in a little plastic page protector thing. I got to make a cover and in some ways it was my first book. But I was writing stories all through elementary. I like to describe myself as an older kid still just telling stories...and I don't think I will ever grow out of it!

Motivational Monday: A Whole New Book

[Link] The Unexpected Benefits of Reading at Random

Elspeth Wilson on Becoming a Literary Omnivore

by Elspeth Wilson

As someone who has spent much of the last half-decade trying to “make it” as an author—an increasingly slippery ideal, I fear—it feels bizarre to admit that for much of my adult life I didn’t read fiction at all. Sacrilegious, even. Like so many other writers, I’d loved books as a weird, shy child, finding them refuge, friend and escape all wrapped into one. But as someone who’s a very slow reader, I just couldn’t keep up with the volume of reading that was demanded of me as I progressed through school and then university.

If we had to do assigned reading at home for English, it would take me ages and sometimes I’d have to cram pages in breaks before class. By the time I was studying for my undergrad, reading felt like a chore I couldn’t keep on top of. I stayed up late to finish articles and usually only managed a couple of chapters of books that were assigned in their entirety. When I had any free time, the last thing I wanted to do was struggle over more reading.

Then, in a quintessential story of reconnecting to reading, I moved to a new city at twenty-four. I was lonely and often very sad. I was in a long-distance relationship, I hated my job, I had an undiagnosed disability that sometimes caused me such agonising pain I couldn’t leave the house. It turns out circumstances such as these will push you back to considering novels as your friends. To reading in bed when you can’t do anything else. To imagining yourself in different worlds.

I used to feel stressed about reading all the hot, trendy books, getting caught up in the emphasis publishing puts on newness, but now I’m much more likely to read an older book than one steeped in hype and discourse.

At first this rediscovering of reading was delicious. I read on my way to work, distracting myself from the dread of going into the office. When it felt impossible to see friends or go out in bleak London weather, I had a cozy activity to do at home. I found my own taste, reading a lot of heartbroken free verse poetry by young women, plenty of queer romcoms and what the industry might describe as “contemporary women’s fiction” like Big Little Lies.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/the-unexpected-benefits-of-reading-at-random/

Captain Science Goes to Oz! (New from BEN Books)

Science and fantasy collide in the merry old land of Oz in the new digest novel, Captain Science in Oz! available in paperback and ebook at Amazon worldwide with more retailers to follow. The author will also have autographed copies for sale soon.

When his old enemy, the Beast Men of Rak, invade Oz, Captain Science answers Oz’s call for aid. BEN Books presents Captain Science in Oz!, a pulpy action-thriller by Bobby Nash featuring the return of the 1950’s super-science hero, Captain Science. Cover illustration by Jas Ingram.

Currently in Progress -- Movie Reviews for Writers!

 Movie Reviews for Writers: 75 Movies About Writers and What You Can Learn from Them​

Movies matter. As long as movies are about people—even people like Marvin the Manic Depressive Robot or a monster like the one created by Victor Frankenstein—they will matter. Movies, like books and radio dramas and tales around the fireplace or campfire, introduce to people, some like us, some vastly different, some good, some bad, and some in those wonderful shades between the two (my favorite people, hands down).

     —From the Introduction

Movies  include:

1. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
2. House
3. Paris When It Sizzles
4. Stories We Tell
5. An American Ghost Story
6. Kill Your Darlings
7. Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
8. Tatami
9. The Haunting of M.R. James
10. The Adventures of Anais Nin
11. Playhouse
12. They Live Inside Us
13. Authors Anonymous
14. Peripheral
15. The Nesting
16. Dead Poets Society
17. Shadowlands
18. Howling IV
19. Finding Forrester
20. Valerie on the Stairs
21. The Owl and the Pussycat
22. Scare Me
23. Wodehouse in Exile
24. The Shining
25. The Eclipse
26. Secret Window
27. The Haunted Hotel
28. Cold Ones
29. The Bat
30. Tenebrae
31. Grace
32. The Girl in the Book
33. Nightbooks
34. Shortcut to Happiness
35. Agatha and the Truth of Murder
36. Hush
37. The Darkness
38. Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show
39. In the Mouth of Madness
40. Throw Momma from the Train
41. S‏hirley
42. The Black Press—Soldiers Without Swords
43. Flannery
44. Conjuring Spirit
45. I Spit on Your Grave
46. 1408
47. Christmas in Connecticut
48. Amuck
49. Alegoria
50. You Are My Vampire
51. The House Across the Lake
52. Half Light
53. The Medusa Touch
54. Velvet
55. Skin Deep
56. Horrors of the Black Museum
57. Salem’s Lot
58. Dirty Work
59. She Makes Comics
60. Another Man’s Poison
61. Writer’s Retreat
62. Ghost Land
63. Kiss of the Damned
64. Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark
65. Fantastic Britain
66. Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane
67. House of Long Shadows
68. The Norliss Tapes
69. Snowed Under
70. If You Believe
71. Killer Book Club
72. Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir
73. The House of Marsh Road
74. The World According to Garp
75. Trumbo

[Link] Ray Bradbury’s favourite books of all time

by Rachael Pimblett

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes about a future where books are banned and burned, and a darkness rules over everything, noting, “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Before the author passed away in 2012 at the age of 91, he left behind a list of his favourite books of all time, which is a culmination of sorts because Bradbury began writing stories as a child, in reaction to the Great Depression, and at the age of 18, he was already publishing short stories in fan zines, which were enshrined in a slippery sci-fi sensibility.

While Shakespeare’s Hamlet lauds “Words, words, words”, both in and out of his madness, we might picture Bradbury meandering through the great hall of life, smiling, sighing, ‘Books, books, books’. The first of his very favourite works was The God of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; forget the book, for he deemed Burroughs’ entire oeuvre “the most influential” of any “writer in the entire history of the world”.

Bradbury has similar tastes to the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Nelson Mandela, who have all recommended The Grapes of Wrath. Though we deem it today as one of the great American novels, Bradbury thinks differently: “every other character is a description, a metaphor, prose poetry, it’s not plot…”

Ernest Hemingway is known for a sharp writing style, depicting his adventurous life with a fruitful sourness; however, less than a decade before the end of his life, he penned the beautiful novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which follows an ageing Cuban fisherman in a solitary struggle to catch a giant fish in the Gulf Stream.

Bradbury and his friends read the mature work the very day it was published in Time Magazine, reminiscing, “We carried them off to a bar that was still open, and we sat and read The Old Man and the Sea, and we talked about Papa and how much we loved him."

Read the full article: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/ray-bradbury-favourite-books-of-all-time/

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION PROUDLY PRESENTS JEZEBEL JOHNSTON VOL. 10—NO QUARTER

Airship 27 is excited to offer the tenth chapter in the Jezebel Johnston Pirate Queen saga that has become one of the most popular New Pulp series in print today. Having won her own ship and crew, Captain Jezebel Johnston returns to her home island of Tortuga to find her friend, the Lady Antonia and her mother, Mosifa, in need of help to survive. Antonia’s husband, a landed businessman, has died, and to maintain his trading goods operations, she must procure new goods. Which is where Jezebel sees an opportunity for her pirate crew. By raiding the fat Spanish galleons, they can keep Lady Antonia’s shop supplied indefinitely. It is a simple plan, but one that will ultimately test her new crew in the ways of piracy.

 Meanwhile, in another part of the lower Caribbean, her old ally, Walter Armitage, has made a deal with the very devil himself, Captain Henry Morgan. In return, he will be given his own ship and command. But to do so means betraying Jez and leaving her and the Revelation to hunt alone. Once again, writer Nancy Hansen delivers a fast-paced, suspenseful chapter in the life of the daring queen of the high seas, Captain Jezebel Johnston. This is the adventure loyal readers have long been waiting for, and it does not disappoint.

 Award Winning Airship 27 Art Director Rob Davis provides the interior illustrations, while Michael Youngblood the gorgeous color cover.

 AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION – NEW PULP FOR A NEW GENERATION!

 Available now at Amazon in paperback and soon on Kindle.

Currently in Progress -- My Barbaric Yawp!

In this follow-up to Giddy and Euphoric: Essays on Reading, Writing, and Ray Bradbury, Sean Taylor continues his fascination with the nuts and bolts of the writer's life. 

Essays include:

1. Introduction by October Santerelli
2. The Sweaty-Toothed Madman: Reading Is Becoming; Writing Is Telling Who We Are
3. The Great White Savior (Or Why It's Way Past Time To Retire Tarzan, Sheena, and The Last Samurai)
4. Visceral Writing + Nostalgia = Effective Writing Every Time
5. Envy and Imitation
6. Help! I'm Stumped and I Don't Know What To Write!
7. 15 Action/Adventure Tropes That Need To Die a Painful Death
8. This Week's Theme Is, Well, Theme
9. Bono and Flannery: Harder to Believe Than Go Crazy Tonight
10. What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)
11. Do, Do, Do, Da, Da, Da: The Day The Police Taught Me About Character Dialog
12. The Centre Is Not Central—Normal Heroes Among Dragons
13. The Description Toolbox: 3 Tools Every Writer Needs
14. Close to the Vest—Embracing the Mystery in Your Fiction
15. Writing for Comics—A Basic Primer for Newbs
16. O' Captain, My Captain: Taming the Writers' Group Monsters
17. 35 Books (Almost) Everybody Should Read
18. My Backstory Story
19. The ABC (Plots) of Ongoing Storytelling
20. Wrote Rage
21. Hard to Market, But It's Okay
22. Paying Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, or Ruining the Magic Trick for All the Right Reasons
23. Tightening the Tension
24. Creating Religion in Your Stories
25. Geek Culture: Leading the Way AND Pulling Us Back?!
26. The Editing Onion
27. My Diversity Soapbox (Or Don't You Throw That "Woke" Shade at Me)
28. It’s the End of the Literary World As We Know It (But Don’t Be Afraid—It’s a Good Thing)

[Link] Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time: Essential Reads That Changed the World

by Kamal Shukla

Non-fiction literature possesses a unique power to transform perspectives, educate minds, and inspire action. Unlike fiction, these works ground themselves in reality, offering insights into human nature, historical events, scientific discoveries, and personal triumphs. The greatest non-fiction books transcend their original publication dates, remaining relevant across generations.

Why Non-Fiction Books Matter

Reading non-fiction expands knowledge while developing critical thinking skills. These books provide windows into experiences beyond our own, whether exploring distant cultures, understanding complex scientific concepts, or learning from the triumphs and failures of remarkable individuals. The best non-fiction works combine rigorous research with compelling storytelling, making difficult subjects accessible and engaging.

Read the full article: https://www.classicpages.in/blog/best-non-fiction-books-of-all-time-essential-reads

Sunday Funnies: Genetic Disorder

[Link] Three Life-Changing Books to Transform Your Reading Journey

by Ahaqir

Many people read to escape reality and forget about their problems. And some people read because they want to change their lives for the better. Which is why we have created a list of three life-changing books that you need to read!

Books are magical and they are also educational. Many books will have a life lesson that will stick with the readers. And people will take different lessons away from a book. With that said, we decided to list three books that changed our lives and the lives of many readers.

And no, this isn’t a list of self-help books that changed people’s lives. Instead, we chose novels that impacted the lives of readers by making them fall in love with reading, astound them with an incredible fictional tale, or give them life lessons that changed the direction of their lives. You can see the full list below!

Read the full article: https://booksofbrilliance.com/2025/12/24/three-life-changing-books-that-you-need-to-read/

Barry Reese's The Peregrine Returns in The Gasping Death!

Teasy Weezy (not final covers)

Coming in 2026!

New Printing Coming in 2026!

Coming in 2027!

Coming in 2026!

[Must Read] The ugly truth about using AI to create images

A lot of people using AI to create images don't understand how it works and they need to so they understand the legal risk every image potentially represents.

by Linda Caroll

When Jean-Léon Gérôme died in 1904, his maid found him slumped over one of his paintings of Truth. He painted her over and over. She was always naked. The Naked Truth. Stepping out of a well, or holding up a mirror to humanity.

Or dead at the bottom of a well, like the painting above, from 1895.

Naked truth, killed by falsehood, he called it.

I love to use classic art on my posts. There’s just such an endless supply of it, and there’s always something that fits. Plus, it allows me to celebrate the work of an actual artist in a world where actual artists are appreciated less than ever before.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was a painter and sculptor whose work was so widely reproduced that by 1880 he was called the world’s most famous living artist. 145 years later, most people don’t even know his name. They know the phrase “naked truth,” though, even if they don’t have any clue what the hell the naked truth is anymore.

I’m an editor of four publications on Medium. Here’s what people tell me.

They tell me they create AI images because they couldn’t find anything to properly capture the essence of their writing.

Self-delusion at its finest. I’m sorry, the internet is filled with public domain images. Hundreds of thousands of them, and you want me to believe that? Gerome alone painted over 300 paintings. And he’s one of thousands of artists whose work has moved into the public domain. Absolutely free to use. No strings attached.

No, you’re using AI-generated images because it makes you feel like you can do something you couldn’t do before AI existed. It’s really that simple.

And they think “they” made the end result. Which is also not true.

A while ago, I saw a Note that made me laugh. I wish I’d re-stacked so I could re-find it, but I’ll get the context right, if not the exact details.

A fellow said someone (a friend? a teacher? I forget) showed him something he’d made with AI and proudly said, “Look at this! Before AI I couldn’t do this.”

So he laughed and said, “You low-key still can’t.”

The person looked at him, closed the computer, and said, “You’re low-key not wrong.”

I had a little laugh and moved along.

A few days later, I’d read a story that brought that Note back to mind.

I ran across the story of a designer who had truth shoved in his face in the most stark and shocking way and still failed to see the truth because of his own delusion.

Read the full article: https://borked.substack.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-using-ai-to

Motivational Monday: Hard Times Are Coming