Taylor Hohulin's Blog

Favorite 2019 Reads

2019 was a fun year for reading. I made a point of spending more time with my nose in a book and less time with it hovering over a screen, and I ended up doubling the number of books I read. I found some new authors, revisited old favorites, and found a handful of books I’d consider for an all-time favorite list.

Here’s what I’ve got. Feel free to let me know your favorites in the comments.

Signal to Noise – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

You don’t get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it...

Your Best Apocalypse Now – Reading List

In case you missed it, I published a book recently called Your Best Apocalypse Now. It’s a comedy about how a guy accidentally guesses the official plan for the end of the world, but then the apocalypse doesn’t go as planned, so a couple angels enlist his help to save the apocalypse, and he joins them, hoping to sabotage the apocalypse. Believe it or not, things get weirder from there. I had a blast writing the book, and if you have a blast reading it, here are a few of my favorite comedies a...

Lessons from Writing Funny

I read somewhere that writing funny stories takes three simple ingredients:

Funny characters…facing funny problems…and coming up with funny solutions.

Boom. Easy-peasy, right? When I went into writing my new book Your Best Apocalypse Now, I figured it would be a nice change of pace. A nice easy change of pace. I’d been writing twisty, weird science fiction with tons of worldbuilding and crazy monsters for years, so surely it wouldn’t be too hard to write a short, funny novel. It would be a wa...

Practice Finishing

I was this close to giving up on Your Best Apocalypse Now.

Once I hit the midway point, I started losing steam in a big way. The book just didn’t feel funny anymore, I felt like it was moving too slowly, and the whole project was so tonally different from everything I’d done recently that I couldn’t imagine it working out well. On top of all that, I’d started picking at the edges of a pretty cool idea for my next book.

I had a shiny new idea in front of me, but an old and tarnished one stood...

Favorite 2018 Reads

And here we are, at the beginning of a new year. 2018 was a wild one for me, personally, professionally, and as a writer. It would be a huge marketing error if I didn’t take the chance to say that one of the things I did in 2018 was write a post-apocalyptic road trip adventure novel with wizards and alternate dimensions called Tar, and you can read a free preview of it here.

If you’ve got some Amazon gift cards from Christmas lying around and you’re looking for books to read in 2019, may I re...

Tar – Playlist

I’ve always enjoyed making these book playlists. I love music, so it’s an opportunity for me to share a few of the songs I’ve been listening to lately while sharing a few details from my new book Tar, which comes out November 27. I hope you enjoy…the songs AND the book.

Song 1: Ravenhill – The Stranger

I left home / Now I know for sure / Hope is dark / The road impure

I mentioned recently that I wanted Tar to mirror the story structure of an epic quest, while being set on a crumbling highway...

Tar – Reading List

My new book, Tar, comes out November 27. It’s a post-apocalyptic road trip adventure with wizards and cults and alternate dimensions and people with cybernetic body parts. If you want to know more about what it’ll be like, here are a few books to help you get a better feel.

Borne – Jeff VanderMeer

The New Weird is a fairly small sliver of the fiction world, but I absolutely fell in love with it while writing Tar. It’s marked by genre-blending, subverted norms, and, yes, a whole ton of weirdn...

How to Choose a Cover

Recently, I shared with you the final cover art for my new cyberpunk/urban fantasy novel Tar.  Denise Wy of Cover Atelier did my art once again, and once again she nailed it.

I wanted to share the various iterations the cover went through to reach its final state – in part because I find it incredibly interesting, but also because you need to see all the other cool stuff Denise came up with that I had to turn down in order to end up with the awesome cover I have now.

The whole process starts...

Tar – Cover Reveal

Brendan Cobb calls it tar, but there might be as many names for it as cities left standing.

To some, it’s known as filth, or blight. Others call it the Black God in reverential whispers. Whatever name it takes, the effects are the same. Cities left in ruins. People turned into monsters. Living infections with no known cure. The best anyone can do is avoid it, but even that gets harder the more it spreads.

Brendan survives this waking nightmare by trading salvage for shelter and for repairs t...

NaNoWriMo Lessons

NaNoWriMo is upon us, and before long, writers all over the world will be frantically piling up as many words as they can, as fast as they can.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It happens every November, when tons of writers make it their goal to write 50,000 words in a month. Its an easier task for some than others, but it’s a really cool time of camaraderie between artists, with a focus on linking up with other local writers.

I’ve only done NaNoWriMo...