Looking at my last name and the last name of the author of Seeing Red, you’ll understand why this isn’t a review. My brother is author T. M. Doran. As such, this posting is not a proper review of this novel, it won’t receive a rating, and it won’t be […]
I read Dead Leaves by Kealan Patrick Burke and added Dead of Winter immediately to the list. Dead Leaves is a great novel to read at Halloween and during autumn. Dead of Winter, which targets Christmas and wintertime, is not quite at the level as its cousin collection. A sample […]
If I asked “what are the elements that make up a story,” how would you respond? Characters, plot, theme, mood. All correct answers—full points. But most people forget the one element of writing that distinguishes some writers from others. It’s the writing itself. Many, if not all, writers are readers. […]
Sweet Remembrance by Emily Anne Putzke is a hidden treasure and one of the best retellings or interpretations I’ve read of any fairytale. This is a tall claim, but I’ll stick by it. “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen is a short story meant to both challenge and […]
In my Kingdom series, I’ve taken the main character of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” and put her into a fantasy epic as a queen. If you’ve read “The Little Match Girl,” this may seem like an odd choice. Yet, Andersen’s short story is a fairy tale, and […]
I created this page for “Tell a Fairy Tale Day” in 2024 (February 26, 2024, to be exact). In 2022, I did something similar for Snow White, see The Snow White Read-Off. This page will be a little different in that it will be a collection of all things “The […]
Might of the Divided City by Jeremy Gordon Grinnell accomplished a rare feat while I was reading it. I planned to review it, I planned to take notes on it, but suddenly, I was so wrapped up in the plot and characters, I was just reading it with the abandon […]
Jenifer Lynn’s Winters’ Resonance (A Series of Echoes Book 1) is a horror novel that scares us with the most frightening monster of all—teenagers. Seriously, it’s a chilling story of killer humanoids that appear as teens from out of the night to wreak destruction. In the prologue, a family on […]
Full disclosure. I met professor and poet C.J. Giroux before either of us started as students our freshman year at our different universities. He and I became friends while working a college job. We rarely discussed writing, English, or the arts. Even in the years since, our friendship has been […]
E. B. Roshan’s Final Chance: Shards of Sevia is a drama set in a fictional country (Sevia) currently in the middle of a major internal conflict. The ethnic Turs and the Sevia majority are violently clashing until Europe sends peacekeeping troops. With this tenuous situation in place, a young woman […]