In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
Rounding out a trio of essays by contributors to the new anthology Crimes Against Nature: New Stories of Environmental Villainy, Mark Stevens joins us to discuss his story, “Bad Influence”—with paragraph-by-paragraph commentary, even of paragraphs just a single-sentence long! Do check out the previous posts by Robert Lopresti on “The Trouble with Saving the World” and Janice Law on “The Smart One”—and the full anthology, with additional stories by Michael Bracken, Susan Breen, Sarah M. Chen, Barb Goffman, Karen Harrington, R.T. Lawton, Jon McGoran, Josh Pachter, Gary Phillips, S.J. Rozan, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden.
Mark Stevens is a terrific writer in several directions: a novelist, a short story writer, and a blogger and reviewer too. His latest novel is The Fireballer, which the Denver Post praised as “a lively baseball novel… with details that make the book feel genuine,” and Trapline, from Mark’s Allison Coil Mystery Series, won the Colorado Book Award for Best Mystery. Next year, Thomas & Mercer will publish No Lie Lasts Forever, the first in a series of new thrillers. Mark’s short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and in the anthology Denver Noir, and you can find his book reviews on his blog. Stevens is previous past president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and he contributes to the podcast for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.
You can find more about Mark at his website here. And here’s more about Crimes Against Nature at the Down & Out website as well.
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
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