Kevin Singer's Blog, page 3

Watch This Movie: Pearl

I got into a horror kick recently. Why do I love horror? The thrills, the inventiveness, the over-the-topness, the almost cartoonish quality that stylized, fake horror, when done right, can have. Pearl came up on my Amazon Prime feed. The promo image was a Wizard of Oz riff, a Dorothyesque girl climbing a Scarecrow mount. […]

Trope or Choke: Episode 9

The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines: Setting: Haunted House Genre: Romance + Adventure Trope: Love in rehab Characters: A woman missing three fingers + a blind baseball player POV: 3rd/past The result: Love Is Just Another Drug Oliver dug his claws into Nina’s shoulder so hard she […]

Trope or Choke: Episode 8

The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines: Setting: A Saints game Genre: Underwater exploration + English mystery Trope: Overcoming a fear of flying Characters: Brad Pitt’s stunt double + a character dying of cancer POV: tense: 3rd/future The result: Hyperion Buddy knows this: Gods still walk among men. […]

Anatomy of a Story, or the Only Way to Deal With an Impossible Crush

We’ve all had at least one. Or two. Or several. You meet someone and you get nearly instantly hooked, despite all logic or reasoning. Yet you know, for reasons beyond your control, that it can never ever be. The impossible crush. Sometimes the only possible thing you can do is to get as far away […]

Trope or Choke: Episode 7

The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines: Setting: Scotland Yard Genre: Dystopian + military sci-fi Trope: New frontier Characters: Captain Kirk + manic pixie dream girl POV/tense: 2nd/present The result: A New Frontier Awaits You His name: Ossetian. Lieutenant in the Global Atlantic Empire’s Forces. Red hair. Muscled. […]

Writing Shit, or How Joseph Conrad Rekindled My Love of Writing

(Note: this is a long one.) A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. I don’t aspire to write great literature. All I want is to create characters and situations that entertain me first, and then a wider audience. I do aspire to the condition […]

Anatomy of a Story, or How I Came to Create the Tale of Poor Nori

Self-promotion time: one of my stories has been picked up for inclusion in the now-available anthology Summer of Speculation: Sidekicks. My story is called Champions of the Nereid, and it’s a story about a rudderless woman named Nori who falls under the spell of Hyacinth, a charismatic woman whose mission it is to cleanse the […]

Trope or Choke: Episode 6

The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines: Setting: A deep freezer Genre: Horror + ’90s redux Trope: Wai-Fu (tiny girl who kicks ass) Characters: Cleopatra + absent-minded professor POV/tense: 3rd person/present tense The result: Mister Pointy Returns It reads: Do not open. Professer Wentworth purses her lips. “What’s […]

Trope or Choke: Episode 5

The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines: Setting: On the bus Genre: Dark academia + Speculative Situation: “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” Characters: Elon Musk + a hotshot POV/tense: 1st person/future tense The result: Heart Like a Fortress One day my heart will surrender its walls. […]

Read This Book: Children of Time

620 pages. That’s how long this brick of a book turned out to be when I got it in the mail. Hell no, I thought. But then I started to read it and I didn’t want to stop. Children of Time, the 2015 sci-fi novel by British writer Adrian Tschaikovsky, is a supremely imaginative story […]