Inspired by my short story, The Leak, and featured on my podcast, Horror Humor Hunger — If you haven’t yet read my short story The Leak or listened to season one of my podcast Horror Humor Hunger, you might want to! Of course I’m biased, but this recipe was custom-created by an expert bakeware inventor and recipe developer just for that story. The Leak is about…

A real-life ghost story happened right across my street, and I soaked up every minute of it. — I’ve always loved anything scary — movies, books, haunted houses, you name it. I grew up reading Stephen King and watching Tim Curry as Pennywise over and over and over. So, I guess it’s no surprise I’m now an aspiring horror author. As I was preparing to launch the first…

Add words, but add depth, too — In the fall of 2020, I took an obscure idea that had been knocking around in my head for awhile and turned it into a novella called The Rotting Room during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The manuscript clocked in at about 53,000 words, which is par for the course…

Some guidance for first-time ARC readers — Ever wonder how books that haven’t even been published yet already have reviews? I sure was curious, so I started looking into it. Publishers have many ways of generating buzz before a book launch, like offering gifts with preorders, scheduling book tours for authors, buying traditional advertisements, and more. …

But it did give me a sense of closure I didn’t know I needed — When the email inviting me to my ten-year high school reunion first popped into my inbox, I was, in a word, pumped. …

From animation to alcohol, these books have a lot to offer — As I get older and keep reading and exploring the world, I’m always shocked by how little history I actually learned in school. There’s so much more to history than what happens in one single place, time period, or to one specific group of people. I find this exciting, because…

And the rest of the family will love them, too! — Now that I have an 8-month-old, I’ve entered the exciting, exasperating, terrifying, but necessary phase of introducing solid foods. We’re going for a Baby-Led Weaning (BLW) approach with our daughter, which basically means we’re skipping purées and going straight to gummable finger foods, like strips of omelet, soft noodles, roasted…

These books really are winners — Surely I’m not alone in thinking that just because a book won a prize, that doesn’t make it a great book. For starters, there are so many things that can make a book great — the writing, the format, the characters, the plot, the cultural moment it captures, the subject…

‘The Bachelor’ has become an unsatisfying anachronism — I wouldn’t call myself a diehard member of Bachelor Nation, but I do enjoy watching the show. Before my friend got me hooked on it in 2016, I thought The Bachelor was, in a word, stupid. I thought it was trashy, cheesy, and uninteresting. Well, I was right — at…