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Reading Time: 7 minutes Valerie. Her name crisp on his lips, cinder-rough; hers are cotton candy. Elegant, too—a subtle breeze, a faint whisper. Desired, and so – oh, so! – desirable. He whispers it into her ear, Valerie, Valerie, Valerie. She’s watching him, silent. Her round cheeks are all covered in minuscule freckles—as if polka-dotted. The sleek tentacles of her bulky, bright-orange hair – Valencia oranges, Valerie-oranges – tickle him on the neck. Teasing, beckoning. He leans closer.

Reading Time: 4 minutes No matter what type of writer you are, it’s easy to feel anxiety while writing. It might be because you want your work to be perfect, you’re worried that no one will like it, or you believe that it’s not good enough. These negative, anxious thoughts keep you from moving forward with your work. To escape these thoughts, you need to replace them with positive ones. Here are three things to remember to help you with your writing anxiety.

Reading Time: 4 minutes (Image by Lucas Carl on Unsplash) Nothing grips your attention better than gossip and revenge. And Michelle Wong’s House of the Beast has a healthy dose of both. Centering on Alma, a child that grew up poor but is actually heir to a very prestigious noble house, the novel explores revenge, growing up and developing a somewhat functioning brain, and religions based on eldritch beings.

Reading Time: 12 minutes Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for July 24, 2026 Did you know that Amazon has a list of the top-selling and free sci-fi and fantasy books? The list changes constantly — authors and publishers set their books to free temporarily to promote their work, and, of course, books move up and down in the rankings. Read on to find your fun free read for this weekend! And grab the books quickly because they don’t always stay free for long.

Reading Time: 20 minutes Near the banks of the Mekong Delta in a tangle of mangroves, Private Wyatt Turner and three other soldiers waited for the patrol boat. During the four months he’d been in Vietnam, Wyatt learned more about Americans than in all his twenty years in Wyoming. He’d never seen a black person before, except on TV, or been friends with a Mexican. The only city people he met were guests as Gary’s Dude Ranch.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Kane Parsons’ Backrooms (2026) approaches the liminal horror subgenre, which his YouTube series The Backrooms (2022-) helped popularize, from a different thematic angle. Establishing Liminal Horror Liminal horror typically warps and infinitizes the transitional spaces between the familiar. Exit 8, the Role-Playing Game Liminal Horror, and Parsons’ other webseries The Oldest View are other contemporary examples.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Panel 1: (Wiz, Bud, and Frog Prince are gathered at a table.) Wiz: Emergency party council meeting. We forgot Greg’s birthday! Panel 2: Frog Prince: I didn’t forget. Bud: I just thought we weren’t doing anything. Panel 3: (Wiz facepalms.) Wiz: We’re the worst friends ever. Nat Couture is a cartoonist and short story author from Western Massachusetts. Their previous comic Snoz and the Kid was featured in the Mount Holyoke News. It can be found on X at @KidSnoz.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Photo by Johnny Kaufman on Unsplash The morning of the hunt dawns crisp as a McIntosh apple. Tara wakes before sunrise, the sky just beginning to turn the barest pink in the east. Red sky at morning. She hopes it’s true. A storm would help her today, of all days. She pulls on her trainers and windbreaker, both Christmas presents from last year, when she decided to take up cross-country at Fitzgerald Junior High.

Reading Time: 14 minutes Days before she became ill, Lea detected unpleasantness ahead. She was convinced—and this insight lingered throughout her illness—that her husband was deceiving her about the recent falling off in the quality of her household duties, particularly her skill over the wood-burning stove. Her mammalian stew had become inedible, he said, her aquatic chowder an abomination, her relaxant beverage at nighttime a form of drainage.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Editing your work can be an incredibly frustrating experience. You might cringe at what you have written in the past or, while you’re able to power through your thoughts of self-doubt, the words just don’t seem to cooperate as you tweak them. In the end, you feel as if you’ve hit a dead end. But there are things you can do to keep from feeling stuck as you edit. For one, it’s important for others to read your work.