Ania Ahlborn's Blog, page 7
November 4, 2013
10 Unconfirmed Victims Of Famous Murderers
ARTICLE BY ROBIN WARDER VIA LISTVERSE.COM
When a notorious serial killer is caught and imprisoned or executed, one cannot help but wonder if all of their crimes were uncovered. Serial killers are manipulative sociopaths, and when put in a position where they have nothing left to lose, they will often enjoy playing games with the authorities. Some will outright refuse to admit to unsolved murders they committed. Others will falsely confess to unsolved murders they had nothing to do with. Here a...
October 30, 2013
Yes, No, Goodbye: My Haunted Childhood
This is all true.
The first thing I remember buying with my own money as a kid was a Ouija board. It was a Milton Bradley board in a non-descript box on a shelf among a hundred other board games. Clue, Risk, Life, Monopoly: I could have bought any of them, but instead I grabbed a box with a single word on the front that I didn’t even know how to pronounce (I spent my entire childhood calling it a Wee-Gee), doled out my hard-saved cash, and took it home.
Back then, my parents and I lived in a do...
October 28, 2013
NaNoWriMo: 10 Survival Tips
image via bunda.ru
It’s nearly that time again—the time of year where the air has bite, the nights are cold, and NaNoWriMo warriors far and near dust off their keyboards and prepare to stare at the unforgiving blink of the computer cursor with dogged determination. Some approach National Novel Writing Month with an air of celebration; this is their chance to strut their literary stuff, to put that long-gestating story idea to paper, to excuse themselves from family barbeques and movie nights b...
October 25, 2013
10 Modern-Day Exorcisms
VIA PRAIRIEDOGMAG.COM
ARTICLE BY GARETH MAY VIA LISTVERSE.COM
We’ve all seen Linda Blair inThe Exorcist, turning her head like a spinning top, speaking in more tongues than a polyglot at a United Nations conference. But for some, the banishment of an unseen spirit from a human host isn’t just the stuff of horror movies—it’s real life.
10 Kamille Seenauth
In 2005, Patricia Alvez was sentenced to10 years in prisonfor the murder of Kamille Seenauth in Georgetown, Guyana. Alves ran a “Spirit Church”...
October 20, 2013
25 Steps To Being A Traditionally Published Author: Lazy Bastard Edition
ARTICLE BY DELILAH S. DAWSON VIA TERRIBLEMINDS.COM
This is like that Couch to 5k thing people do to gear up for a marathon. Except you can do it without leaving your couch. And for me, a book is a better souvenir than a popped-off toenail.
What follows is the quickest, dirtiest, most simple route to writing a novel and getting it published by a traditional publisher, which I accomplished from my own couch in Atlanta while nursing a baby and having neither an MFA nor any previous contacts in pub...
October 16, 2013
Keeping Secrets: Building Suspense or Deceiving Your Reader?
ARTICLE VIA NY BOOK EDITORS
I thought I had a fantastic short story— you know the feeling. It was thick with understated suspense, snappy dialogue and dynamic characters with names like “Chub Henderson.” I worked and reworked the draft, and when I had a polished story I was proud of, I shared it with a trusted reader – a professor of creative writing. As I waited for his response, I imagined all theways he might compliment me, and the direct call he’d make to his agent to recommend this talent...
October 12, 2013
Splat Goes the Hero: Visceral Horror
ESSAY BY JACK KETCHUM VIA LITREACTOR
I wrote a book a while back calledThe Girl Next Doorwhich opened with the line, “You think you know about pain?”Personally I’m no expert so far–knock on wood–though as a kid I had my share of broken bones and various other less than delightful body-surprises over the years: a cortisone shot into an inflamed tendon, my upper jaw peeled and scraped — did you know that pain can be a sound? — and a fall, stark naked, through the branches of a tree that left me...
October 8, 2013
There’s No Such Thing as Good Writing: Craig Nova’s Radical Revising Process
ARTICLE BY JOE FASSLER VIA THE ATLANTIC
Craig Nova, author ofAll the Dead Yale Men, is a manic rewriter. He showed me a picture of what he calls his “slag heap”—a huge stack of manuscript pages, piled several feet high, that accumulated as he wrote his latest book. Nova does not merely tinker with word choice the way some editors do; instead, he writes again from scratch. Sometimes he’ll approach a first draft in radical new ways, adopting new points of view—even trying again in different genr...
October 3, 2013
10 Reasons New Orleans Is Master of the Macabre
ARTICLE BY WILLIAM BRYAN LAYTON VIA LISTVERSE.COM
The roots of New Orleans run deep into the banks of Lake Pontchartrain—and for nearly three hundred years, their soil has been fertilized by blood. Initially a French penal colony, it seems that the city has never really strayed too far from its nefarious roots. Settlers gave it Christianity, slaves gave it voodoo, and the turbulence of the two religions gave New Orleans much of its rich culture. Ravaged by time and weather, today’s New Orleans...
September 29, 2013
A Look into the Poltergeist Curse
ARTICLE WRITTEN BY RYAN VIA RHINOSHORROR.COM
This is a horror movie with an even more horrifying back story. ThePoltergeistcurse.
The Steven Spielberg written and Tobe Hooper directed film has to be the scariest PG rated film ever made. Granted, the rating system in 1982 was much different than it is today but that is still extremely impressive nonetheless. What madePoltergeistsuch a successfully scary film was that the family being terrorized by these ghosts were so believable, they just had a...
