October 2025 – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: ghastly, ghoulish gaffes that can haunt your writing

Don’t let these goblins creep into your writing.

Peak scary season is upon us, my goblins and ghouls, friends and fiends. Whether you’ll be doling out sugary treats to the little monsters that knock on your door this Halloween night, partake in an adult-oriented costume party, or binge on classics like Young Frankenstein or Rocky Horror Picture Show (I highly recommend either, or both if you’re in the mood for a science fiction double feature), know that after tonight, it all comes crashing down like a sugar high, and we all must end our revelries and return to our writing. (Although some of us may prolong that inevitability by celebrating well into el Dia de los Muertos. Why not make a weekend of it? They’ve already got Christmas decor in the aisles of Dollar General and Hobby Lobby.)

Even after all the hoopla subsides, we writers must come to terms with some scary goblins that can haunt our work year round. Here are five scary creatures that may hang around well after All Hallows Eve, like toilet paper on the stately elm in the front yard of Mr. Henderson, who always handed out those filling-yanking sticky, taffy-like things wrapped in waxy orange and black paper.

No more NaNoWriMo? No problem! Write that novel anyway

Introducing a new Substack to help you draft your novel in November

Even though the annual November writeathon known as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is no longer a thing,* you can still get started on that novel in November. A new Substack is here to help you out.

Introducing First Draft November, a new writing challenge for aspiring novelists.

Humans vs. AI: Who’s winning the content wars?

How to we writers battle the AI machine?

This time of year, college students everywhere are playing the in-person role-playing game Humans vs. Zombies. It’s all in good fun, of course. But online, another competition, more foreboding to the future of content creation and the future of writers is taking place.

Call it Humans vs. AI. Like some mutant undead unleashed on civilization, artificial intelligence is threatening to cannibalize online content.

Video: nine great writing tips from Ray Bradbury

I enjoyed this shortish (under-14-minute) video from the Bookfox channel on summarizing nine writing tips (or “hacks,” as Bookfox calls them, because everything is a hack these days) from science fiction maestro Ray Bradbury. Give it a watch and let me know what you think.

Friday Five: ‘Bad Mexican, Bad American’ author and poet Jose Hernandez Diaz

‘I think I always wanted to be a rockstar or musician growing up. Poetry was a way for me to be like a one-man band.’

My American friends think I’m too Mexican.
My Mexican friends think I’m too American.
My Mexican American friends are my road dogs.

– Jose Hernandez Diaz, “Ballad of the West Coast Mexican American/Chicanx”

These opening lines to the first poem in Jose Hernandez Diaz‘s 2024 collection, Bad Mexican, Bad American capture the essence of Mexican American identity, the feeling of being caught between two cultures and never fully at home in either.

It’s a recurring theme in this writer’s prose poems and free verse, which explore first-generation identity, surrealism, cultural hybridity, among other themes. But his writings encompass broader, universal themes and issues. As one review describes it, Bad Mexican, Bad American “effectively and thankfully eludes simple categorization, refusing both assimilation and accommodation.”

A native of southern California, Jose studied English and creative writing at Cerritos Community College, the University of California Berkeley, and Antioch University Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in several literary journals, including Yale Review, Southern Review, and Poetry. He also is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and two new collections, The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). In 2017, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow. As a writer in residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a frequent presenter, he shares his writing expertise with other aspiring writers.