Big-ass monitors. You love ’em. I love ’em. We’ve both spent our lives trying to find the right one. For the longest time, I’ve been putting off the move to 4K based on how strange my wife’s 5K iMac looks. But then: providence. I was randomly looking around and came across this Dell S3221QS at a pretty steep discount. Ordered it, took a week to get used to the curve and the 4K, and now I don’t think I could ever go back. This? This I love.

For the first three years of his life, my son has enjoyed classic books like Goodnight Moon, The Pout-Pout Fish, and The Going to Bed Book. More recently, I’ve been trying to expose him to more mature books like The Ghost on Saturday Night, My Teacher Fried My Brains, and of course, the absolute best children’s book in history, Sideways Stories From Wayside School by Louis Sachar. I can usually get a page or two into those before he complains how long is this story? And when I calmly explain to him how much of an impact Sideways had on me as a child and an adult, he pretends to get tired and fall asleep. Such is parenthood.

Once upon a time, there was a dragon. In this dragon’s ear was the biggest strawberry farm you’ve ever seen. Everybody loved the dragon’s strawberries, but the only person the dragon allowed to pick them was Little Matador. And the only reason he…

Like many independent authors, I’m convinced the path to publishing success begins with a killer Twitter bio. 160 characters are all that stand between us and critical acclaim (and approval from our fathers). Unfortunately, no one has the perfect formula for what you’re supposed to put in your bio. Hashtags? Emojis? GPA? Credit Score? Everyone has ideas, but as with most things Twitter, I tend to take my cues from my favorite authors.

We think we’re special because we’re humans. We think we can linger on after our death. I doubt that, and for that reason, I don’t believe in spirits or phantoms or ghosts. Now, dog ghosts, on the other hand…

I’ve sometimes referred to Jetson as my writing partner, but it’s not in a cutesy way in which I imply he puts his paws on the keyboard and smashes out a few sentences. Whether it was the early morning or late at night, Jetson was always by my side when I was writing. If I hit a wall, I’d turn and pet him for a while. I’d bounce ideas off him. And when I finished a chapter, he would be there to look at me as if I were the most amazing person in the world.

It has been a month since I finished reading Providence by Max Barry, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. On the surface, it’s a relatively simple story that will take you back to the good ol’ days of Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers, but it also throws in so many modern writing tricks that it feels like something completely new. The story moves fast, skipping past the extraneous to get to what people really want to see: big ships firing big guns.

NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, which means a new crop of writers will be looking for the right software to help write their 50,000-word opus. Enter Novlr, a web-based writing platform that is simple, clean, and eager to motivate you to reach your goal. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo for the first time, Novlr is a great choice. But what about the rest of us? What about the seasoned amateurs who haven’t done NaNo (as the kids called it back then) since they were tiny little dystopian cyber-thriller writers? Is Novlr a good choice for writing novls? Let’s take a look.

I mentioned in a previous Thursday Roundup that I had started reading We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor but that after encountering the line the butthurt is strong with this one had completely given up. That’s still true. Cringe is one of those things that’s hard for me to get past, but after talking it over with a few friends, I was encouraged to give it another shot. I’m happy to report no further cringe incidents, and in fact, it’s a pretty damn good book. Well, two books.

I was doom-scrolling Twitter the other day and like a sudden ray of light through a storm, I saw an ad for Sara Gran’s Come Closer. Normally, I don’t pay attention to book ads on Twitter, but this one came with a quote from Bret Easton Ellis, who I don’t understand as a person or an artist but whose opinions on books I’ll listen to occasionally. Regarding Come Closer, Easton writes “What begins as a sly fable about frustrated desire evolves into a genuinely scary novel about possession and insanity. Hypnotic.” So I picked up the book.