Tag: Joe

  • Write Like a Gangster, Class 19: Dialogue Continues

    Write Like a Gangster, Class 19: Dialogue Continues

    Hey, ho, let’s go! Reading Assignment: “Collision” and “Mrs. Galvin” chapters from Teardrop Road The Vanishing Tag This is the lesson I have heard when it comes to dialogue: Don’t tag too often. Don’t get too specific with your tag. First, let’s define tag. A tag is very simple. He said is a tag. We…

  • My Apocrypha 11: Servant’s Garden

    My Apocrypha 11: Servant’s Garden

    Gonna get through this one as fast as I can. Try to make you understand why Servant is the way he is. Try to show you the most important thing in his young life and how it was taken from him. He doesn’t really want to talk about it. Never has wanted to talk about…

  • The Sin Eater 25: There’s Lust in the Backwoods

    I’m at home. Just got out of Pizza Hut and I have a full belly. No one around at all. Quiet, til he pulls up, and I hear Billy Joel. The door is open before the knock. He steps in and puts his hands on his waist and looks at his feet. “Get in the…

  • The Sin Eater 19: To Kill A Man

    You never got much notice on a thing like this. Maybe a day, maybe two. Rose complained, but the women of the Mocking family have little power, and she knew not to fight it. “Just remember he’s a pathological liar,” Rose said as I made for the door. “You can’t believe anything that Ball says.…

  • The Sin Eater 12: Aunt Easy Part 2

    “I heard that you have a new friend,” Uncle Ball said to Shadow. Shadow had no idea who this person was except that he was important, and that he was fun, and that he was dangerous. Nothing scared Shadow, and after a few hours of this guy talking to Rose, Shadow found himself in the…

  • The Sin Eater 10: Waynesville Part 1

    My name is Joe. I disappeared for a long time between Bekah and I breaking up in 1998 and the writing of Teardrop Road. When I came back, I had no idea what all of this technology was about. I didn’t know what a cell phone was. Computers had been taught to me by Mr.…

  • The Round Table 28: Mark Part 2

    Here we are again. In a fantasy book I haven’t published yet, these two young warriors are escaping an enemy, and they approach a bridge, and the leader yells out, “I’m gonna do it again!” The other one says, “You won’t be happy til you get us killed.” And then they both jump over the…

  • Rise of the Storyteller 23: The Broken Boy

    Of course, it all fell apart. It would be years before I found that sort of happiness again. For three months, Jazz and I were the second-best couple in Slinger Middle School. They were, at that point, the only three months of my life worth living. She was my first happiness. Our story was cut…

  • Rise of the Storyteller 21: Young Guns

    X pulled his knife and stopped at the car parked outside the bar. “What?” I said. It was dark, it was cold. We had just trashed someone’s house and I wanted to get home. “I’m stealing this,” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked carefully and saw a blob…

  • Rise of the Storyteller 19: A Stolen ID

    “Absolutely not, Joe,” Jazz said. She stepped in front of me in a cloud of girls, right after I stepped off the bus, and she looked up at me. I was for my feet. My eyes, my heart, my body seemed stuck on the ground. “This is how you lost Ruffle,” Jazz said. It was…