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While you were away binging Marvel’s Jessica Jones last night, the publishing division announced a brand new ongoing series for a character who has never received the honor before: Mockingbird. Chelsea Cain (Mockingbird: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary #1) is writing the first ongoing comic with Mockingbird and artist Kate Niemczyk is creating the interiors. Cain explained to Marvel.com […]

Dark Horse Comics has announced that Chuck Palahniuk, the novelist behind Fight Club, will be featured as a recurring character in the Fight Club 2 comic series.

Palahniuk will make his first appearance in the third installment. The release date has been set for July 22.

The fourth issue will introduce characters based on the members of Palahniuk’s real life writing group: Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, Lidia Yuknavitch, Suzy Vitello, and Diana Jordan. That book will be published on August 26.

Palahniuk gave this statement in the press release: “Literary critics claim that Ken Kesey’s mental hospital in Cuckoo’s Nest and Toni Morrison’s plantation in Beloved represent those authors’ post-graduate writing workshops. To prevent anyone from thinking my own workshop is either a support group for the terminally ill or a bare-knuckle mosh pit, I’ve included it in Fight Club 2.”

 Kelley Ragland has been promoted to associate publisher at the St. Martin’s Press imprint, Minotaur Books. She will also continue to serve as the editorial director.

Vice president Andrew Martin gave this statement in the announcement: “Over the past 22 years Kelley has become one of St. Martin’s most dedicated practitioners and advocates of the mystery and crime fiction trade, creating an impressive standing and profile within and without these Flatiron walls.”

Ragland has been with the company since the launch of the imprint in 1999. Some of the authors she has worked with include Chelsea Cain, Steve Berry, and Allison Brennan.

This round of Required Reading is dedicated to the place we at Powell's Books call home: the great Pacific Northwest. Whether you're from the area or you simply appreciate the region for its beauty, history, temperament, or legendary bookstore, these titles will give you a more nuanced understanding of this peculiar corner of the U.S. [...]

This round of Required Reading is dedicated to the place we at Powell's Books call home: the great Pacific Northwest. Whether you're from the area or you simply appreciate the region for its beauty, history, temperament, or legendary bookstore, these titles will give you a more nuanced understanding of this peculiar corner of the U.S. [...]

Publishers Weekly featured writing tips from Chelsea Cain, another Portlander who writes mysteries.

I especially liked number three:

Always remember that you are the boss. Don’t let your characters tell you what to do.  They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds. I tried this for years. I would create characters based loosely on people that I knew, and before long that character would be talking back to me. “I’m not sure Stacey would do that,” Stacey would say, when I tried to convince her to go into the scary basement alone. And she’d be right. Stacey wouldn’t do that. No one would, really. I didn’t bloom as a fiction writer until I figured out how to make up characters out of whole cloth (not based on anyone), and I stopped worrying about what they’d do in real life. My characters have to do what I tell them. And if I need Stacey to go into that scary basement, then that’s what she’s going to do.

You can read all the tips here.