Excerpt: Charlie N. Holmberg’s Book of Magic By Charlie N. Holmberg + giveaway

Unravel the secrets to crafting a masterful magic system from best-selling fantasy author Charlie N. Holmberg.

Charlie N. Holmberg’s Book of Magic
By Charlie N. Holmberg
Nov 12, 2024
Genre: Speculative Nonfiction, Writing Self-Help
Unravel the secrets to crafting a masterful magic system from best-selling fantasy author Charlie N. Holmberg.

Whether using magic as flavor or as an essential piece of plot, this book will guide fantasy authors, from new to experienced, through the delicate layers of creating, utilizing, and mastering magic systems.

In this book, we will...

*Discuss the schools, laws, and spectrum of magic

*Learn to build individual pieces of a magic system

*Dig into magic’s influence on worldbuilding

*Examine different types and styles of magic

*Develop and polish original magic systems

With workshops, work pages, and reference materials included, this succinct one-and-done guide to crafting the magical elements of the fantasy genre is a must-have for speculative fiction authors.

“If you haven’t had the fortune of attending one of Charlie’s writing classes (which I have), this is the next best thing. Book of Magic contains so much wit, wisdom, and practical suggestions for helping any beginning author, or veteran, make their magic systems rise up and be noticed. She uses expert examples from other authors you know as well as teaching a masterclass on developing magic systems from scratch based on methods she’s invented. You just may need this book to help find out what kind of magic-based diseases might be festering in your neighbor’s cabbages.” —Jeff Wheeler, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Kingfountain series

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Originality

Before we get into the bones of building a magic system, I want to take a page or two to discuss originality.

Originality really is what separates a lot of books and a lot of authors. In fantasy, it’s tempting to default to an “easy” magic system so we can focus on storytelling. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—if I want to start my story in medias res , with a man being assaulted by a vampire in an alleyway, all I have to do is say “vampire” and the antagonistic force is set. I don’t have to waste time grounding the reader, because vampires are so common, I can start the story with no learning curve. And if I’m trying to hook readers on the action, then this is absolutely a tool I’m going to use.

Books can employ simple or preset magic systems when the goal is flavor, highlighting power, or invoking a fantastical setting. Easy magic has a shallow learning curve, and therefore can attract more readers, especially those unused to the conventions of the fantasy genre. But for those who want magic to be a large part of the story—tied in deeply with characters and plot—take a moment to differentiate yourself from the books that may sit beside yours on the shelf (or above and below you on the Amazon scroll). Take your time with it—don’t rush development. Great magic systems, like great stories, need time to marinate in your brain before they come to life on paper.

A few tips to spark originality:

Take note of what’s currently saturating the market and avoid it. If you bank off writing to market, then jumping on the bandwagon of what’s hot now can pay off in the short term. However, if you want something to stand out in one of the many slush piles of traditional publishing, or you want to guarantee your book will still be interesting ten years from now, consider taking the untrodden path.

Take a “done” magic and make it different. If your heart is set on elemental magic or powered-up tattoos, that’s okay! Just put a unique twist on it. This is what Stephenie Meyer did with Twilight. She took vampires (done, done, and done) and made them her own. This is also why you can have two books with seemingly similar magic systems and have completely different stories. Case in point, both Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer trilogy and Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker use color-based magic. But the magic is explored in such fundamentally different manners that the casual reader would never dream of comparing them.

In regard to my Paper Magician series, I wasn’t the first person to think of magical origami (though at the time, driving in my car between Idaho and Utah, I thought maybe I was). Paper magic is also in the 1999 manga series Read or Die, for instance. But my expanding paper magic into the realm of manmade materials made it unique. If you’re trying to turn heads, you don’t need an entirely unique, never-seen-before magic system (or hey, let the book’s premise be the unique element and go ahead and write about fairies or fire or whatever makes your id  happy). You can have something familiar with a unique twist or quirk.

Make a list. This process can be done with any aspect of brainstorming, not just magic. Make a list of whatever it is you need to figure out, such as what kind of creature will innately possess magic in your story (more on this in Chapter 6). And just start vomiting out ideas. The further down the list you get, the harder your brain is working, and the more original your ideas will be. (Note that going too far down the list might leave you with something too bizarre to realistically work with.)

For example,
1.    Unicorns
2.    Vampires
3.    Pegasi
4.    Flying frogs
5.    Flying fish
6.    Giant bats
7.    Giant butterflies
8.    Wolves with butterfly wings
9.    Forest-eating caterpillars
10.    Three-headed snakes

Based on that list (which I literally did write off the top of my head and have not changed from the rough draft of this book for the sake of reality), I really like the idea of forest-eating caterpillars. And they can transform into giant butterflies, so that’s a two-for-one.

Remember, more often than not, simpler is better. It’s really easy for us to go overboard with our worldbuilding and open a giant can of worms that will devour and suffocate our readers, so it’s important to keep it simple. Take a moment and think of the best magic systems you’ve read in your favorite books. More likely than not, you could explain them to someone quickly and concisely. Getting too complex with magic steepens the learning curve and frustrates readers.

Rule of thumb? If you, the author, have to continually look at your notes to remember how your magic works, your reader isn’t going to stick around to learn it.

 1 Meaning “in the middle” of the action.

2  A la Freud: id, ego, super-ego. The id is your carnal desire, your impulses, your pleasure center.

About the Author:
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Charlie N. Holmberg is a Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of fantasy and romance fiction, including the Paper Magician series, the Spellbreaker series, and the Whimbrel House series, and writes contemporary romance under C. N. Holmberg. She is published in over twenty languages and is a Goodreads Choice Award, ALA, and RITA finalist. Born in Salt Lake City, Charlie was raised a Trekkie alongside three sisters who also have boy names. A BYU alumna, she discovered in her thirties that she’s actually a cat person. She lives with her family in Utah. Visit her at www.charlienholmberg.com.

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Excerpt: Midnight Pages Mystical Inspiration and Writing Prompts for Writers, Insomniacs, and Night Owls by Diane Riis

Ewe won’t believe this!!

Those things that go bump in the night? They’re trying to tell you something. I wrote a whole book about listening to the messages your insomnia is trying to send you. And if you see or hear things in the night, that confirms it for me: the night has something to tell you. If you want it to be otherwise, I get it. I ignored the night for YEARS until I couldn’t anymore.

Here’s what I found out: If you don’t get up and do something with your messages (or at least honor the messengers,) then you are just dooming yourself to more sleepless nights. More bleary-eyed days with nothing to show for it.

For a long time, I resisted this truth. Even though I believed it 100%.

The night is your shadow. It’s your dark side. It’s the piles of unconscious genius you’ve been ignoring in favor of the ordinary.

If you can’t sleep you are up for a reason.
I have a bad track record with sleep. I guess the night has always been my cave, my true home. But even as a newborn, I never slept. Not just colic. Just not a sleeper.

That’s my neuro-divergence and I now longer try to fix or feel bad about it. You shouldn’t either. Maybe it’s your nature and anyway an eight-hour mono-sleep is not the normal human pattern – not for our cave-dwelling ancestors or anyone else throughout history.

One problem with sleeplessness isn’t only the frustration. It’s the fear.
If you’re like me you’ve spent nights frozen in fear of the dark. I’d stare into my room until the shadowy shapes started to look like people and it got even harder to close my eyes and doze off. Things would bump and creak and I’d search my brain for their source. But I never could identify any. I can sleep once day breaks (or more accurately at 2:00 in the afternoon.)

But I was up for a reason and once I got a hold of that – everything changed and now I perk up and pay attention to things that scared me before. And, I stopped being afraid of all the doom and gloom about dying young and getting fat if you can’t sleep at night, too.

But spiritually it was even more profound than that…
Now I know the shadows and messengers and the night itself were calling me to get up and DO something. (Since I’m a writer, I wrote.)

And, three times, entire books have come out of it. Now I know that insomnia is the SIGNAL: Message coming in! I better listen to – or more insomnia is my reward.

Your house isn’t haunted.
Or maybe it is. But YOU yourself might be haunted if the night is keeping you up. It’s the shadow side of you trying to get your attention. It’s the archetypes of Goddess Nyx, the guiding stars, the sounds of crickets and owls. It’s your unconscious, the things that are trying to help you make sense of your crazy, screwed up life! It’s the shadowy crone at the crossroads, pointing to the right choice, or direction.

Things gestate in the dark. And there are things you should be doing: writing, planning, creating. Get up and give birth to them already!

Until you get up and do the thing that calls you, you’ll never sleep through the night without melatonin, hypnosis, or medication.

Sleeplessness might come in waves and cycles. If you miss it, you may never get it back: that inspiration that could have led you to write a bestseller or invent the next million-dollar Shark Tank investment.

It may not be fun.
I have been the recipient of scary, unclear messages I could not interpret. That’s frustrating I will admit. The most surreal sign came one night when I was lying there, eyes burning, staring at the wall. Three lights suddenly appeared, hovering over a dresser. They were yellow, green and orange (I figured that was probably spirit’s version of red.)

So it was like a stop light, I guess. And I mean, they were there, undeniable. I scooted over closer to my sleeping spouse and prayed for the lights to go away or at least not to come any closer. They didn’t feel ominous except for the fact they didn’t belong there but I was terrified!

I frantically tried to figure out the source but there was no way they came from anywhere but thin air or Spirt (or a spirit guide of some sort – one of whom has since become more of a companion, but I can’t blame him for the lights. But I wouldn’t know any of my spirit guides if it weren’t for being up in the night.

I never saw the lights again but they came during a stall during writing this book: Midnight Pages. www.themidnightpages.com . If I had to interpret (guess) I’d say the message was,

“You believe the night has signs and messages and you’re even writing a book about it. And you’re lying there? Trying to sleep? Don’t’ be a hypocrite! Get the heck up and write!”

I stopped stalling after that.

Yes, I get messages in the night and Midnight Pages is the result: a book about stopping fighting your night owl tendencies and making it an adventure. Maybe you’ll become someone who says, “I do my best work at night.”

What I know is if your day is wrecked by how little you slept the night before you might as well have something to show for it.

So, if you are a writer, a journal keeper, a spiritual seeker, a creative or someone who believes imagination is key to life, the night has something to tell you and if you’re awake already, don’t just lie there. Get up and listen. Like Rumi says, “Seeker, don’t sleep.”

Midnight Pages
Mystical Inspiration and Writing Prompts for Writers, Insomniacs, and Night Owls
by Diane Riis
Feb 2, 2022
Genre: Nonfiction, Self Help, Writing, Journal, Workbook
Publisher: Earth and Soul Publishing
ISBN: 9798985131000
Number of pages: 370
Word Count: 25,000
Cover Artist: Book Designer: Andrea Schmidt, a-schmidt.com
The night has something to tell you.

Midnight Pages is a workbook of magical prompts and creative writing exercises. It is also the antidote for anyone who has ever tried (and failed) to get up early to write morning pages.

Embrace your nature! Whether you do your best work at night or you’re going through a bout of insomnia, you will deepen your writing practice and learn to listen to the voices of the night.

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WRITING PROMPT From Midnight Pages:

Close your eyes. What do you hear, smell, taste? What do you sense at an energetic or intuitive level? Spend some real time. Find at least twenty-five things. When it gets hard to add to the list is when it gets interesting…”

Excerpt:
VIGILANTIA
Vigilantia: lying awake, sleepless, vigilance. The silence and stillness of midnight might feel suffocating, dense, and thick—heavy with foreboding. It might have you lying in bed, heart pounding, afraid of the dark.


Under the cloak of night, your hearing is heightened. Sounds startle you awake as you drowse. Your mind can ramp up: haunting memories, recriminations, regrets, and stuck thoughts keep you from your rest. Some “insights come up as well and sensations: the surge of adrenaline, pricklings on your neck. You might feel the weight of the dark bearing down on you or you notice movement in the shadows. Maybe you have the sense you’re being watched. Something lurks in the dark that’s imperceptible during the day. You might feel like you are not alone, and that subtle presence over your shoulder seems familiar. You wonder if it’s been there before, maybe even always. During the day, with music blaring and people talking, you just don’t perceive it. Ask what message all this has in store for you. Don’t reject what you hear. Don’t dismiss. Allow.

Night belongs to the spirits. –Proverb

About the Author:

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Diane Riis is author of five books and owner of Earth and Soul Coaching and Publishing which works with Indie authors, writers and magical practitioners who want more joy in their lives. She is a metaphysical minister and witch offering spiritual direction (which is a process of reflecting on your journey and learning to observe how you participate in your personal spiritual framework.) She offers writing coaching and classes as well as High Vibe, Soul Deep writing workshops and retreats for women who understand the power of the collective. Rev. Dr. Diane owns and operates a remnant flower farm on Long Island, NY all the while raising dogs, cats, chickens and a boy.

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Some writers do their best work at night. Rather than worry that you’re not getting enough sleep, let your insomnia be your writing prompt. Get up and listen to the night. https://www.themidnightpages.com

#insomnia #writingprompts #creativewriting #sleepdisorders #publishyourbook #authorsupport #writingatnight #midnightpagesvsmorningpages #midnightpages #writingpractice #nightlywritingdiscipline

Fantasy author Connor Coyne: How to Tell, and Show, Like a Champ + giveaway

HOW TO TELL, AND SHOW, LIKE A CHAMP

“Show, don't tell.”

From high school creative writing courses to graduate-level MFA programs, this is some of the most ubiquitous advice given to aspiring writers.

And often, it is good advice for writing.

Telling is a staple of day-to-day conversation, whether we're giving a friend directions to our house or asking our kids to wash up before dinner. After all, you wouldn't show your mother-in-law when she should get to the concert: “Find your seat as the sun finally plunges behind the horizon and all of the shadows converge into a great gray mass.” No, you'd say, “the show starts at 8, so meet us at 7:30 so we can all get seats.”

But the demands of fiction and poetry are quite different from our day-to-day routines. Writers seek to share a memorable, even changing experience, and in so doing it is more important to convey meaning, not data, through their words. To let readers know that this experience is different from any other, and must be read, and read carefully.

“Olga arrived at 7:30,” is a serviceable way to move the plot forward, but it says nothing of the unique experience of that moment in a character's life. But if you wrote, “Olga stepped from her car right as the sun plunged behind the horizon, and all of the shadows converged into a great gray mass,” you are sharing something a reader can imagine themselves, and that brings readers, writers, and characters all closer to a common experience.

Hence, “show, don't tell” is good advice for writers to orient themselves toward the job they need to do.

But once this lesson is absorbed, once writers are comfortable communicating with readers via their senses and observations, is it always good advice?

The greatest assumption in the dictum “show, don't tell” is that these modes are fundamentally different and always in opposition. Neither is true.

One could reasonably argue, that “showing” is just “telling” with a different emphasis. In the above example, the writer isn't telling the reader that “Olga arrived at 7:30,” but that “the sun plunged behind the horizon.” The writer is telling the reader about a sensory experience, not the time of day. Or, to put it differently, the reader has the opportunity and responsibility of greater experience and interpretation, but the writer is still supplying the raw materials that the reader will interpret. In that sense, “showing” and “telling” aren't different kinds of communication so much as the same kind of communication with a different emphasis.

Moreover, showing and telling are not always in opposition, and the most powerful and effective writers know they can complement and enhance each other:

“Olga stepped from her car right as the sun plunged behind the horizon, and all of the shadows converged into a great gray mass. It was the beginning of another night. A longer night. Nights would go longer and longer for months and months, and the last thing Olga wanted was to sit with a bunch of strangers and listen to her granddaughter's faltering clarinet warbles.”

In the above example, the first sentence stresses showing: it allows a reader to see what Olga sees, from her own point-of-view. The middle of the paragraph, however, defaults to telling: it informs us of what the sunset means to Olga. It isn't describing this through physical observation, but it states, with the voice of authority, how Olga feels. In the end, the example returns to showing: now that we understand Olga's melancholy mood and her desire for solitude, a reader's ability to imagine and hear the dissonant music helps strengthen their empathy with Olga. There is no way to imagine this scene without showing, but it is the telling that supplies Olga's state of mind.

If you pick up any well-written novel or short story, you'll find examples of this, with the showing – the sensory details – tied to readerly imagination, and the telling – the information – tied to readerly knowledge. And to be sure, the relationship is negotiable. There are no hard lines. Some writers will attempt to convey all of Olga's thoughts and feelings through her actions and sensations, without ever describing her thoughts at all. This is a very useful exercise for any writer. Other writers will incorporate more information, more data, or reveries and memories and daydreams which, themselves, may be admixtures of showing and telling.

I have grown very frustrated, over the years, by this false dichotomy between “showing” and “telling.” What begins as a useful guide to writers learning to suss out imagination and vigor from the written word ossifies into a stale dictum that limits both imagination and vigor. I challenge all of my students to consider the many ways in which a story can be told – to consider what the reader needs from their story – and then to use both showing and telling to get it done.

In the end, the success of any story is not contingent on the writer's faithful obedience to a set of pre-ordained rules, but to writing that to which readers respond. Writers owe their allegiance not to abstract concepts like “showing” and “telling” but to apply their skills to tell the story that needs to be told in the way it needs to be told.

Urbantasm (The Dying City Book One)
by Connor Coyne

September 6, 2018
Genre: YA, Magical Realism, New Adult, Teen Noir, Lit Fic
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
ISBN: 978-0989920230
ASIN: 0989920232
Number of pages: 450 pages
Word Count: 85,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
Forge22 Design
Urbantasm is a magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.

Thirteen-year-old John Bridge’s plans include hooking up with an eighth-grade girl and becoming one of the most popular kids at Radcliffe Junior High, but when he steals a pair of strange blue sunglasses from a homeless person, it drops him into the middle of a gang war overwhelming the once-great Rust Belt town of Akawe.

John doesn’t understand why the sunglasses are such a big deal, but everything, it seems, is on the table. Perhaps he accidentally offended the Chalks, a white supremacist gang trying to expand across the city. Maybe the feud involves his friend Selby, whose father died under mysterious circumstances. It could even have something to do with O-Sugar, a homegrown drug with the seeming ability to distort space. On the night before school began, a group of teenagers took O-Sugar and leapt to their deaths from an abandoned hospital.

John struggles to untangle these mysteries while adjusting to his new school, even as his parents confront looming unemployment and as his city fractures and burns.

“A novel of wonder and horror.”— William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist

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Excerpt Book 1
Chapter 1
I have to become the Antichrist.

I realized this one night when I was standing on an overpass looking down through a chain-link fence onto the expressway below. Blue neon light shined off icy puddles. The gutters were flush with slush. Empty houses, ragged wrecks, hung out on tiny lots to my left and right. Beneath me, the cars that this city had built were leaving it – some of them forever. Across from me, on a rusted trestle, a freight train slowly passed, bringing in the parts for more cars.

As the train moved on through, I thought about Drake and about how God had fucked him over. How he’d fucked us all over. Then I thought about the house with Jesus graffitied on its side. Orange skin, blue eyes, green thorns. A welter of wounds. I clenched my jaw and my teeth squeaked together. Across from me, the train wheels squealed.

If I wanted to save my friends, I would have to murder God.

Chapter 2
This is mostly my story, but I’m gonna start out by telling you about what happened to Drake. Just so you know – just so you can see right off the bat – what a bastard God could be and why a lot of us had it out for him.

In the summer of 1993, Drake had just turned sixteen.

He was going to be a junior, and his horror-show-of-a-life finally seemed to be turning a corner. He’d been living with his dad and sister in the trailer park when his mom finally moved out of her little house in the Lestrade neighborhood. She’d given it to Drake’s dad. She knew damn well that he wasn’t going to pay any rent, but she didn’t care as long as he kept the kids. Now Drake would have empty houses next door instead of empty trailers. He, his sister, and his dad had filled a couple dozen Hefty sacks with all their stuff and dropped them in the trunk of their scraped-up Benedict.

One trailer over, Sapphire watched, leaning back against the bent wall, her narrow eyes shaded behind her too-big sunglasses. She was a white girl, also sixteenish, with hair so light it glowed like tallow dripping from one of my mother’s candles. Blue eyes too, quiet laughter, nervous all the time, but silently thrilled to be growing up as fast as she could.

“I ever gonna see you now?” she asked.

“See me at school,” Drake said. “Summer’s done next week.”

“Suck a dick,” she said and laughed.

“Come over to my new place tonight. Come over, what, nine? Bring DeeDee. I’ll get Jamo and TK. Drinks from my dad. We’ll bust up that hospital like we said. I got gold now, you know. Crazy gold.”

And he did. Drake wasn’t a Chalk – fuck those racist fucks – but they were a North Side gang wanting to sell some coke and E out on the East Side, and Drake was their man. Okay, their middleman. EZ set the whole thing up. Drake hated the Chalks but he liked the money and he also liked EZ. How could you not like EZ, talking the way he did? Dude had magnetism.

Even before Drake had unpacked all his shit at the new place, even before the sun had dipped behind the swampy trees shadowing the creek, EZ pulled up in his moon blue Starr Slipstream. A sweet make and model for a blue-collar beater. Rust patches shaped like Martian mountains silhouetted against a dusty sky. EZ called Drake over to the window.

“You straight over here, D?” EZ said. “This all new to you?”

“Naw,” said Drake. “I got all the fiends back on Ash and I’ll get some here too. See my moms lived here years. Lestrade Hood. I know it. Every street. Every liquor store. Every squat the kids go to fuck.”

“What about you?” EZ asked. “You gettin’ some, D?”

“Not now, you know,” Drake said.

“But you got plans on that.”

“I don’t...”

“You better stitch it up then. If boys don’t fuck they die.” EZ grinned without parting his pink lips. Crows feet in the cracks of his mellow yellow eyes. He was white-ish, but he had some black in him, too. It always struck Drake as funny when black kids joined up with the Chalks.

Now EZ leaned out of the car, looking forward, turning to look back, taking in the whole street with its tidy ranches and its burnt-out wrecks. “Le Strayed,” he said, the tip of his tongue probing his teeth like he was rolling a Werther’s.

How old is he anyway? Drake wondered. Older than Drake. Younger than Drake’s dad. It was hard to tell.

“You know,” EZ said. “Jesus was a fool to crawl up on that cross. God made the devil. Devil is God’s tool. Hammer in his hand. And the devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the Earth, and don’t you think that was part of Yahweh’s plan too? What you think woulda happened if Jesus had just said ‘yes?’ I bet we wouldn’t be slumming in Akawe.”

Akawe is the name of this city.

A poor city. A beat-up city. A car-making city an hour’s drive from Detroit, but then the cars it made left, along with the money, along with the people. Akawe.

“I don’t know,” said Drake. “I ain’t religious.”

EZ laughed. “No, you ain’t,” he said. “Here. I got something new for you to test for me. Make some night special. Full of secrets.”

He beckoned. Drake leaned in through the open window. In EZ’s palm, a sandwich bag with five white pills.

“What’s that?” asked Drake.

“A new thing,” EZ said. “Chalks call it O-Sugar. Kinda like E. Kinda not. Try it out. Give it some time. Don’t go to sleep. Gonna see the world through God’s eyes. Feel like Jesus would if he’d said yes to his good friend the devil.”

After EZ signed off, Drake helped his dad and his sister unpack until the sun went down and his friends came over. They all sat on the front porch, passed a 40, smoked up, and put the pills of O-Sugar on their tongues and swallowed. They talked about music and cars and love and sex.

About big old TK who had built a Frankenstein sedan from the soldered guts of four different cars.

About DeeDee, sad-in-her-heart that this boy Shawn would never see a woman in her like she saw a man in him. “He’s on varsity, you know,” she said.

Then, there was skinny Jamo with his horn-rimmed glasses. He kept farting. He said he liked the kids’ urinals best because that way his dick didn’t brush the puck.

Drake didn’t talk much, though. He kept looking at Sapphire – her eyes, her face, her perfect nose – and he felt her laughter run his spine like blue notes down a keyboard. She was a song he hoped he might play some day, but not in a crude way. He hoped he was a conversation she might have.

The kids’ hearts started to glow in their chests with a slow, soft burn. That was the beer talking. They walked down the driveway to DeeDee’s Aubrey.

They left Lestrade and crossed the expressway into Anderson Park – brick houses, neat lawns, where the mayor and the college presidents lived – but even these exalted ones couldn’t keep St. Christopher’s Hospital open in crumbling Akawe. The hospital towered in the midst of the neighborhood, full of empty-dark windows and stern staring statues.

DeeDee parked on a side street of prim Cape Cods and the kids walked the last half block to the hospital complex. Above them, the moon waxed, and the whole sky – the everything – seemed to unfurl and offer itself to Drake, limpid and tender. Is that the O-Sugar? Or just the weed? Drake swelled into the wide space of that raw and thrilling moment.

TK led them across the cracked parking lot to the loading dock.

They hauled up the service gate, slipped inside, and descended into the fluorescent-lit basement. There were seven buildings in St. Christopher’s, but underground tunnels connected them all. After hitting a few dead-ends, the kids found their way to the central building. The six-story main building with a floor plan shaped like a giant cross. As they climbed, floor by floor, moment by moment, the shadows around them expanded with opportunities, with regrets redressed, and the future converging upon their pasts. Infinities of little universes hid in the dark corners of that empty space, clear of matter but clouded with tension, ready to emerge.

By the time they reached the roof, they all felt dizzy and disoriented. Before, their yearning spirits had stretched into each new second, each new room. But now that the potential for movement threatened actual motion – now that acceleration accelerated – they put their hands in their pockets and tried to slow down. The speed of everything was getting weird on them.

“Babies, I gotta sit down!” said Jamo.

They all sat.

“I feel like, like sad and sore,” said Sapphire and she plucked at her hair.

“Hold my hand, Saph,” said DeeDee, and they all held hands.

Far off, the sound of a train rang out and, at that moment, the city lights opened wide like eyes, and the stars glowed and exploded, and heat spilled like syrup from above. Dust and clouds, spinning and shining with lightning and friction. Planetoids and asteroids whirling with volcanoes down jets of solar steam. As the train whistle sang, its sound was compressed, compacted, tonally shifted upwards, higher, with panic. As the pitch got higher and higher, Drake felt better and better, and it terrified him. He climbed on top of himself – palms pushing down on his head – to hold his soaring heart in place, but the shadows everywhere slid up convex hypotenuses from the streets below. They weighed down invisible tightropes that connected to the tallest buildings Downtown. Everything kept turning bluer and bluer. Turning to blue and purple.

The shadows swung their arms. They were the remnants of that abandoned place, humanoid, with blue coins replacing their eyes. They had flown away when their owners checked out and went home or died at the hospital. Now, they returned, suctioned in, pulled back toward the points of departure.

But as the shadows converged and became more humanlike, Drake’s friends had been reduced to matter and residuals. TK and DeeDee and Jamo and Sapphire had all lost their eyes and their ability to speak. Their faces had become smooth planes of flesh and, finally, pure fields of electricity. Small blobs, data balls, started to grow and divide. Oxygen bloomed. The kids floated – impossible! – but happening, and as they did the lights got brighter and brighter, heightened and compressed, flattened and overheated.

“Sapphire...” Drake tried to say, and he leaned toward her, straining to see her features again. He wondered what had happened to him and his friends. What was happening around them. On every side. He imagined their height, sixty feet up. The death it represented.

Then, as if in response, space itself pressed in and Drake felt himself stretched out over the edge of the building. He fell. He was falling. Yellow-blue parking lot lines dropped away behind him and approached. They got small. The last thing he saw before he hit were black streaks of grypanian spirals, dotting away and multiplying.

The sky was a dome, but the parking lot was deep.

Urbantasm: The Empty Room (Book Two)

by Connor Coyne
September 26, 2019
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
ISBN:
ASIN:
Number of pages:
Word Count: 175,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin, Forge22 Design
Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the second book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.

John Bridge is only two months into junior high and his previously boring life has already been turned upside-down. His best friend has gone missing, his father has been laid-off from the factory, and John keeps looking over his shoulder for a mysterious adversary: a man with a knife and some perfect blue sunglasses.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, John must now confront his complicated feelings for a classmate who has helped him out of one scrape after another, although he knows little about who she is and what she wants. What does it mean to want somebody? How can you want them if you don’t understand them? Does anybody understand anyone, ever? These are hard questions made harder in the struggling city of Akawe, where the factories are closing, the schools are closing, the schools are crumbling, and even the streetlights can’t be kept on all night.

John and his friends are only thirteen, but they are fighting for their lives and futures. Will they save Akawe, will they escape, or are they doomed? They might find their answers in an empty room… in a city with ten thousand abandoned houses, there will be plenty to choose from.

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Excerpt Book 2
In the perfect past, in the flushest years at Ellis Island, as overladen ships waked the gray waves and passed into New York Harbor, small groups of Greeks clustered at the prows  and pointed at the broad banks of twinkling lights in the distance.

“Είναι ότι η New York?” they'd ask a deckhand or whoever happened to be standing nearby. “Ya,” he'd reply. “That's Coney Island.”

“Coney Island,” the emigrants repeated in awe, leaning out over the churning ocean to get a better look at their new home. It was sparkling bright, shimmering, these ethereal, auroral sparks in the morning twilight, murmured invitations from the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, to taste the delights of the Boardwalk, of Luna Park, Steeplechase, Dreamland, and rapture on off of the Parachute Drop. The lights preceded the long queues, the dirty work, the discrimination against these Orthodox Christians with their swinging censers and their woolly bearded priests. In the hard years to come, the emigrants always held that first vision of Coney Island in their memories, because it was their first, unsullied glimpse of the Americas, and it had seemed to confirm the promise of a better life here. That's why, days, or weeks, or years later, having saved up scraps from their factory jobs, or having snuck small fortunes overseas, sewn into their threadbare jackets, when they opened hot dog stands in the industrial cities of Southeast Michigan, they called them “Coney Islands.”

That's the story I was told growing up. Like so many of our New World origin stories, it's pretty much bullshit. The immigrants called their wieners “coney islands” because they bought them at Coney Island, and the local Chamber of Commerce banned the words “hot dog” because they figured the stupid immigrants might think their wieners were made from actual dogs.

But when the supposedly stupid immigrants arrived in Michigan and started selling their own coney islands in the nineteen teens, they decided to improve their product. Thus began a long process of prayer and experimentation, roots plucked from tiny backyard gardens, cattle slaughtered at the altar, with providential navigation toward the apotheosis  of the hot dog.

The core of this creation was the wiener itself, and from 1914 these were produced under arcane secrecy by the Richard Goerlich Bavarian Encased Meats Company, later known simply as “Goerlich's.” Perhaps as a nod to the melting pot that threw the German Lutherans in with the Balkanites, a Goerlich was made out of many animals. A puree of pork and beef with secret spices all pressed together in a lambskin casing, tied off and smoked over a hardwood grill. The pork content meant that these Viennas could be grilled for longer than other wieners without burning and shrinking. The spices were sweet and sour: traces of mustard, sugar, vinegar, and salt. When you bit into a Goerlich, you felt the skin snap before your teeth sank into its soft inner flesh.

A Goerlich alone, however, was not enough to make the superior coney. To turn a Goerlich into a coney, you had to top it with coney sauce, mustard, and onions, on a fresh bun, on a hot plate with a hot cup of coffee on the side. To do it right, everything must be fresh. Even the mustard, the simplest ingredient, must taste as sharp as a paring knife and shine as bright as the sun. The Balkanites didn't just chop their onions into large, trapezoidal chunks. Onions were precision-cubed by calloused hands at half the speed of sound before being swept into oak barrels and sealed and chilled and called into use. Akawe Ashkenazi bakeries supplied the buns, which the Balkanites steamed before setting them onto waxed paper gracing elliptical china plates. The thick plates kept your food from burning your fingers. The thick cups kept your coffee from cooling off.

I haven't described the sauce. I've saved the best for last. Finely ground beef heart and beef kidney, mixed with beef suet and more ground up Goerlich's, browned minced onions, and sanguined spices. Which spices? Cumin and chili powder and something else. Something magical. Nobody knows what but the coney chefs, and if they told then they would not be gods.

The truth is, they may not have realized at first the specialness of what they had created. These Greeks, these Macedonians, these Albanians, these Rumanians had arrived in factory burgs to take up jobs in the factories and to serve the factory workers. The immigrants hemmed trousers, cobbled clogs, thatched nobs. They sold their coneys on the side, to earn a little extra, but soon they noticed that the coneys brought in more ducats than their other trades.

This was filling food; as heavy as it was delicious. The X Automobilians, whether sweating in the foundries, grinding through midnight shifts at the metal center, or straining over dies and tools in bright light for hours, could fill up in five minutes with a coney and coffee. The perfect food for an assembly line town, as demonstrated by the ordering shorthand that sprang into life like a new language: “One up” meant a coney with everything; a milestone of verbal economy and the inverse relationship of calories to syllables. So coney stands became Coney Island Restaurants. They bloomed fruitful and fecund, increased in number. Multiplied across the earth and increased upon it.

By the mid-twenties some three-dozen Coney Islands in Akawe served up tens of thousands of coneys a day built by hundreds of restaurant employees. Balkan assembly line workers bent over their stations for hours: one man grilled the Goerlich's, another steered it to its bun and plate, where the next station assembled the dressing, nothing written down, everything achieved with hands and voice, as demanding of speed and rigor as riveting.

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that there were so many Coney Islands that they were served over the river; two restaurants opened on the midst of the East Street Bridge and stayed there for decades. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that the Coney Islands were open 24-7-365. Once, during a flood, a Coney had to hire a security guard to watch the door because the owners had lost the keys years earlier.

The Coney Islands thrived along the factory zones. They pulsed along the Akawe's main arteries. They anchored each neighborhood and kept their street corners noisy all night long, from the wail of the evening whistle to the chiming of the church bells.

When the factories started to wither, the Coney Islands did too.

They held out longer than the factory jobs but, one by one, the great restaurants closed their doors. Midnight Oil Coney Island, Akawe Old Fashioned Coney Island, Delicious Coneys, Joe's Original Coney Island, and most of the others dried up through the 80s. By 1993, there were less than a dozen left.

About the Author:
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Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan. 
His first novel, Hungry Rats, has been hailed by Heartland prize-winner Jeffery Renard Allen as “an emotional and aesthetic tour de force.”

His second novel, Shattering Glass, has been praised by Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City as “a hypnotic tale that is at once universal and otherworldly.”

Connor’s novel Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City is winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2019 Young New Adult Award. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.”

Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published in Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere.

Connor is on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and in 2013 he represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School.

Connor lives in Flint’s College Cultural Neighborhood (aka the East Village), less than a mile from the house where he grew up.

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Book Review: Good Writing is Like Good Sex: Sort of Sexy Thoughts on Writing by C. S. Johnson + giveaway

Good Writing is Like Good Sex: Sort of Sexy Thoughts on Writing 

by C. S. Johnson
March 3t, 2019
Genre: Non-Fiction/ Writing Guide
What makes a book sexy?

I’m not talking about erotica, per say, but what is the difference between a book you eagerly devour and a book you slum your way through?

While there are individual exceptions, the most objective difference between a good story and a downright terrible one is simple—it all comes down to the writing.

It’s either good writing, and we can forgive the technical flaws a little more easily, or it’s bad writing, and bad writing is just bad.

Good writing is more than just good writing.

Good writing is sexy.

If you’re a fiction writer looking to improve your writing skills, this is the perfect, provocative read to encourage you to get down to business and write your story.

Inside Good Writing is Like Good Sex, you will find:
•A titillating perspective on the writing process
•The secret to why your story is special, and how you can make it sexier
•Tips on romancing your readers
•How to write irresistible characters
•Basic writing and story concepts with advanced insights

… and all in a non-gratuitous fashion with a lot of innuendos.

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Good Writing is Like Good Sex by C.S. Johnson is an unapologetic how-to for novel writing drawing comparisons to sex; it is truly a non-sexual book that does dole out some great advice to new authors. Although at times the correlation is somewhat stretched to connect, Ms. Johnson successfully takes all elements in the dance of love, from foreplay to afterglow, and addresses how writing a novel, a good novel, must contain the same elements.

This book is short and somewhat pithy, to-the-point and without superfluous fluff, though it would have been easy to have created extraneous content, I appreciated staying on point. For budding authors wishing to take a deeper dive, Ms. Johnson also provides a referral list by topic.

This was a fun and informational read. 4 Sheep.

Jo Dawson

EXCERPT:

But here is where good sex and good writing have a lot in common, which can offer a great deal of relief when it comes to being a writer.

Here’s the good news:

1. Good sex comes with limits. After all, there is such a thing as bad sex.
Just like you would not want to fall in love with, and marry, and have sex with everyone in the world, you most likely don’t want to write something everyone in the world will read. God is obviously the big exception to this, of course, but for us mere mortals, not everyone is suited for romance, not everyone wants a mystery, or violence, or war, or Amish robots battling against zombie superheroes just outside the gates of hell, etc.

Not everyone wants the things that you write.

And please note, your attempts to please everyone will be counterproductive. I see this all the time: when writers attempt to please their fandoms at length, the writers soon lose their way and no one, except possibly the loudest, most obnoxious critic in the room will be happy, and if you are the loudest, most obnoxious critic in the room, you are probably not a happy person.

If you think I am wrong about this, all you have to do is tell five people you love the most you are taking them all out to dinner together, and they get to decide where—so long as they are in complete agreement. Anyone who has a family should be laughing at this moment, because getting five people to agree on where to eat just about never happens, despite any Olive Garden marketing campaigns you’ve seen.

You will have a much easier time, and a much more pleasant experience, if you just tell them that you are going to take them with you to a restaurant of your choice. If they do not want to go, they can stay at home, and you will not have to worry about them making the experience less pleasant for the people who do want to go.

The same thing needs to happen with our writing. We will discuss this more in Chapter 4.

2. Good sex is special.
When you look at you and your spouse, or Bella and Edward, or Romeo and Juliet, or Jamie and Claire from Outlander ... why is sex so special when it comes to them? Why do we root for them to be bonded together in this way?

In novels, we have shorthand signals for this. Sex often represents, in these love stories, true love between two people. There is often a selection of physical, scientific, biological, sociological, psychological, and religious reasons that support our story’s favorite characters in getting together.

Most characters, for example, are physically attractive. Emotionally, they seem like good people, or people we can cheer for. Mentally, a lot of their appeal in the idea of love conquering all things and breaking through any barriers. And spiritually, we all long for those same things: we long to be wanted, we long to be needed, we long to feel complete.

And that is why it is special when they come together. They are in love—in deep, everlasting, all-consuming love -- the kind that makes you grab the one you’re destined to spend the rest of your life with with all your strength, forcing the last constraints of your flesh against theirs in hopes that your bare souls can touch.

Sex is not ever “just sex.” The process of communication has eight stages—yes, really, talking to someone is actually that complicated—so it should not be surprising to find out that sex is more complicated than just “doing it.” It is a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual act.

Sex is good when it has consideration for all of these elements. A good story should strive to do the same.

You don’t just fall in love with anyone. You fall in love with someone special.

3. Good sex gets better with intentional practice.
The saying goes that “practice makes perfect,” but I tend to agree more with the version that says, “practice makes permanent.” If you practice making cakes with dog poo in them, you’re always going to have a bad product, even if you add more sugar and throw on extra rainbow sprinkles.

So, practice doesn’t make perfect, unless that practice is intentionally focused on improvement.

Both sex and writing get better when you are intentional about optimizing your performance, and that includes practicing. No matter how talented someone is as a writer—because there is a natural talent that some people are really just born with—dedication to their craft will always allow them to get better.

About the Author:
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C. S. Johnson is the award-winning, genre-hopping author of several novels, including young adult sci-fi and fantasy adventures such as the Starlight Chronicles series, the Once Upon a Princess saga, and the Divine Space Pirates trilogy. With a gift for sarcasm and an apologetic heart, she currently lives in Atlanta with her family. Find out more at http://www.csjohnson.me.

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Inkwell: How to (Correctly) Steal Ideas! with fantasy author Kelvyn Fernandes

Hi, my name is Kelvyn Fernandes, author of The Many Adventures of Peter and Fi, and I’d like to tell you that it’s okay to steal ideas. There’s a song I really like by the Australian hip hop artist, Illy, called “Heard it All” (https://youtu.be/dorDfjTX7EM), where the chorus goes:

Please forgive me if it all sounds so familiar,

I'm sure that you've heard this all before.

I'm only one voice in a world of billions

And no idea's original no more

The premise is not to worry about whether you’re being derivative or whether you’re too closely imitating your inspirations or whether your idea is too generic to be unique. Just worry about staying true to yourself and honestly expressing that you through your art. So here are three
guidelines I’ve come up with to help find your own ideas within the ideas of those you admire.

1. Steal without abandon!
Never hesitate to test an idea just because someone else has already had it before you. If you’re really interested in writing about “the chosen one attending a wizarding school” or “the struggle between the light and dark sides of a force that balances the universe”, explore to your heart's content. Every story is based on the sum of a writer’s experiences. And the best stories are based on the experiences those writers hold closest to their hearts.

2. Take Only the Parts You Want!
Analyze your inspirations and determine what you think works and what you think could or should be changed. If you’re copying Thor, for example, is the whole character important to you? Maybe you admire his relationship with his mythical family members, maybe his unbridled confidence, maybe his weapon that returns to him on command. Rather than saying to yourself, “I want a character like Thor”, say “I want a character that has this, like Thor!”

3. Add the you!
Most importantly, understand that stealing ideas does not mean plagiarising them. Once you’ve identified what the this is, you still need to breathe your own life into it. You’re not stealing the fruit off of someone else’s idea tree, you’re planting their seed and seeing what you can grow for
yourself. At the end of the day, even if you’re dead set on writing about a mage named Peter who can manipulate bubbles (my character!), you’re still the one who has to write the story yourself.

The Many Adventures of Peter and Fi Volume I: Homecoming

by Kelvyn Fernandes

December 14, 2018

234 pages

Follow Peter and Fi as they work together, each searching for something uniquely special to them through the four kingdoms of their known world. It’s a tale of fantastical beasts, peculiar characters, remarkable settings, and a unique brand of biochemistry-based magic. A story that focuses on meaningful character interactions, delicate world building, and intense action battles.

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Excerpt:

She emerged within a dark sea of green, shielding her eyes against the crescent moon’s pale blaze. The twinkling stars hummed softly, discordant against the chattering birds below. The lush leaves rippled in the breeze, tempting Fi to dip her toes in for a swim. The wind blew at her back and she turned east to face it. The fresh air carried the salty spray of the Shimmering Sea.

Although she could not see it, she knew it was right there. Her ears caught the distant waves crashing against the shore. One last step, she thought.

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Kelvyn Fernandes decided to follow his dream of becoming an author after graduating from McMaster University with a degree in Biochemistry. He enjoys travelling and going on adventures, with his favourite pastime being back-country canoeing in Algonquin Park. He uses both his experiences with nature and education in the sciences to shape the world of the stories he writes.

Ink Well--One writer’s process explained for the reader with Christina Bauer

As part of the launch tour for my new book SCYTHE, the lovely folks at I Smell Sheep have asked me to share one key insight on my creative process with their readers. And verily, there is a tidbit I’d love to share:

It’s Okay To Suck At Writing. Seriously.

Here’s the deal. Want to be a writer someday? Then have I got news for you: believe it or not, it's okay to suck at writing. Really. And for the record, I'm not talking about 'wow that paragraph could maybe get reworked' suck. I'm talking serious, top-of-the-line, vacuum-cleaner-that-picks-up-bowling-balls-level of suckage, and for a really-really-really long time.

And no, I am not kidding.

In fact, such awfulness is typical and, if handled properly, a sign of great things to come.

Still not kidding.

Here's my story on this subject. I didn't speak until about five, but once I started, I loved to tell stories about the worlds in my head. My first was an elaborate multi-generational quest set in a world inspired by the game Candyland (the bad guy lived in a chocolate palace). Soon, I was sharing these stories at school---during class, unsolicited---to the point where the nuns had to set aside 'special story time' for me so I'd shut up for most of the day (yeah, I was that kid). Once I got the knack of writing, I compulsively penned my tales instead, much to the nun's joy. Later, when it I hit upper grade school, English class was my personal bitch.

Oh, how I thought I rocked.

And lo, Freshman year of High School arrived. With it came more nuns and my first big-girl High School English paper. Man, I worked hard on that sucker. I handed it in and waited with baited breath for the inevitable 100 to come back, the page littered with side notes on my awesomeness. Sure enough, the paper came back, but not with a 100 on the top.

I got a 67. Not a total failure, but pretty darned close. Whoa.

'Devastated' pretty much describes my reaction to this 67. My life was predicated on the concept that I rocked at writing. Now, this seemed no longer true. Even worse, there were kids in my very same class that got perfect 100's on their first paper. Holy shit. They were better than I was. At. Writing.

This launched some major soul searching. I debated about never writing again, for reals. I felt mightily crushed and lied to...what were all those accolades in years gone by? What silly, torturous games were the nuns playing with me in grade school? This mope-fest went on until I eventually pulled up my big girl panties and went back at it, working hard for a better grade. This was Freshman year. I didn't get a 100 on a writing essay until I hit Senior year of English. So there you go.

When I got to college, I had no problems getting good grades, but there were other shocks in store. I met some other writers who were so freaking amazing, it made me want to drop writing again. For example, one kid I met Freshman year wrote his essays in iambic pentameter because, well, he was bored. Bored, I tell you! And it was goooooooood stuff. Like, I could work for weeks and not come up with two lines that were half as lovely. I don't know where that kid is now, but I wouldn't be surprised if he hit his own version of a '67' at some point, just like I did, and had to face the question: now that I have to work my ass off for this, is this still worth it?

Now, the 'worth it' conundrum isn't really a question anyone can answer for you, especially when it comes to writing. That said, at the time, I think it might've helped moi to know that the cycle of sucking-to-getting-better is pretty typical. In fact, it's a sign that your work is growing, and that's not just okay, that's amazing.

Today, I sincerely hope that every book I write kicks the ass of my last one.

Because, at the end of the day, that kind of suck is awesome.

Scythe (Dimension Drift Worlds, #1)
by Christina Bauer
 April 24, 2018
Genres: Dystopian, Fantasy, Young Adult
“Fans of A Wrinkle in Time can’t missDimension Drift!” – Christina Trevaskis, The Book Matchmaker

Truth time. I go to a Learning Squirrel High School. Don’t judge.

On second thought, judge away. Learning Squirrel is one step above attending class in a junkyard. But what do you expect? Everything’s made out of garbage these days. At least, I have my freelance work to keep Mom and me housed, clothed, and fed. How? I’m your regular high school science geek for hire, except my work manipulates space-time. The good news is that these gigs pay really well; the bad news is that the government likes to kill people like me. Whatever. I’m not worried; hiding from their detection systems is easy for me.

Then I screw up one of my illegal projects. Badly.

In fact, things go so sideways that my house slips into two-dimensional space-time. The shift only lasts for a few seconds, but that’s long enough to set off a dozen government alarms. If those goons track me down, Mom and I are as good as dead. Long story short, I need to pay someone off, hide the evidence, and keep us safe.

Unfortunately, that means asking the Scythe for help. He runs the local underground crime scene and has absolutely no conscience…Or at least, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. It’s hard to think straight when a guy’s that hot in an ‘evil Mafioso kingpin’ kind of way. Most importantly, the Scythe is a crime lord who can conceal my slip-up with a few clicks on his minion’s computer keyboards. But the man has his price. In this case, the Scythe wants me to finish a certain dimensional prototype for him in twenty-four hours. I can do it, but it might mean Learning Squirrel High gets blown up in the process. Oh yes, and there’s also my new hot classmate who may or may not be an alien…and he says he’ll do anything to help me.

This job won’t be easy, but I’ve gotten out of worse scrapes. Maybe.

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Christina Bauer knows how to tell stories about kick-ass women. In her best selling Angelbound series, the heroine is a part-demon girl who loves to fight in Purgatory’s Arena and falls in love with a part-angel prince. This young adult best seller has driven more than 500,000 ebook downloads and 9,000 reviews on Goodreads and retailers. The first three books in the series are now available as audiobooks on Audible and iTunes.

Bauer has also told the story of the Women’s March on Washington by leading PR efforts for the Massachusetts Chapter. Her pre-event press release—the only one sent out on a major wire service—resulted in more than 19,000 global impressions and redistribution by over 350 different media entities including the Associated Press.

Christina graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School with BA’s in English along with Television, Radio, and Film Production. She lives in Newton, MA with her husband, son, and semi-insane golden retriever, Ruby.

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