ALISSA YARBROUGH

A "Super" Short Story (6 Min Read) Tasha has made a new man out of me. And I'd die to regret it. I exit the Bugatti under the radiance of a full moon and spring up the flagstone steps leading to the simple, even cottage-like house compared with the mansion I'd driven from. Modest yet elegant. All attributes drawn from the gentle hands managing the unpretentious property. The Japanese Maple, sprouting from the red garden mulch, is reviving from the state the previous owner had

Our society is a visually controlled one, saturated with cinema and flashy videos in order to maintain our shortening attention spans. I'm seeing the same drift in fiction, a molding of the writing to keep up with the dopamine in the action-packed movies. We are showing all right, but along the same vein, we're going overboard in describing every detail as we would see in a motion picture.

Birds Alive!, the first book in the Empty-nesters Cozy Mystery series by Jen Dodrill, is about a woman who finds herself an empty-nester once her youngest child has left for college. Somewhat listless and seeking to turn over a new leaf, she starts a bird-watching club and gets more excitement than she anticipated when the club's first outing involves the death of one of their members.

There is beauty in the arrangement of words, and while I understand in fiction you cannot bore the reader with an overabundance of descriptions and flowery phrases, there needs to be a balance between keeping the pace of the story while not altogether ditching eloquence for directness.

I'll be honest, my audio skills aren't that great. If I want to learn something, I'll need to see it in print to fully consider and understand the subject. This is the exact opposite of some of my siblings who thrive on audio.

University artifacts? Provenance papers? The originality in setting instantly set this book off from the usual suspense novels as I was deciding on a Colleen Coble book to try.

A shudder ran through the walls, and the beams in the ceiling creaked at the savage wind pummeling the corners of the small, wood-framed farmhouse. Sadie swept aside the mulberry curtains and cast an anxious eye at the angry clouds twisting and assuming a pale green hue. She still clung to the anonymous note she'd received that morning. It had been specific in its instruction that she come here, but could its author have foreseen the tempestuous weather? Had they planned for

As a young lass, I can remember a Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl poster filling up the expanse of my sister’s wall, with every action in the room being performed under the perpetually sleepless eyes of Jack Sparrow, Will, and Elizabeth...

Daylight may be failing in this latter part of the year, however, I’m still burning the proverbial midnight oil in scratching my head, learning, and forever recalibrating my path-to-publishing with new information. But here's where you can help...

My parents taught me that in most instances, you stick to Christian fiction or classics that usually have some form of morals. It wasn’t an iron rule, and as I think about it now, it makes perfect sense.