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Upcoming Conventions
It’s official. I am escaping from Hermitdom!
I’ll be at Legendary Confusion in Detroit from Jan. 17 - 19, 2014 and at Life, the Universe, and Everything in Provo from Feb. 13 - 15, 2014. Panel assignments and further schedules to be forthcoming. If someone offers to teach me how to play Magic, the Gathering, I might even jump in as the worst- ( Read more... ) -
Dreamland
My kids asked me what I dreamed about, so I summarized my latest REM plotline involving a magically gifted teenager who joined my expensive skyrise household in order to escape her troubled past. (Yes, I really have dreams like this ( Read more... ) -
Writing Tip #2: The Muse Paradox
Writers often have a love/hate relationship with their muses. We love the burst of inspiration that results in a truly awesome story idea. We adore those moments when the words flow onto the page as smoothly as water pouring from a fountain into a frothy pool, with as little apparent effort. We love the sensation that the story is already present ( Read more... ) -
Blackness, revisited
Three years ago I blogged about The Black Abyss. It's the unacknowledged chasm that lurks beneath every person's existence, the horrifying realization that the relative stability of the present is an illusion. That the people we love will never be truly safe. That malice, accident, acts of God or sheer blatant stupidity could strip away ( Read more... ) -
Pertaining to the Wild Jungle of the Internet
I have concluded that colliding world views are kind of like going to the beach.
Really.
See, we all need sunlight. Vitamin D and all that. But we also can’t handle too much of that beautiful, healthy UV light, because our skin will get red and then start to peel and we’ll feel achy and unhealthy for days on end. So we’ve all learned to moderate ( Read more... ) -
Great Expectations
When I was pregnant with my first child, I discovered the limitations of human biology. The hours of the day, which had previously always sufficed for the multitude of tasks I crammed into them, stretched away beneath my grasping fingers. My evenings became litanies of Things Left Undone, my mornings frustrated contemplations of impossible tasks, ( Read more... ) -
Writing Secret #1
Ok, folks, here's the biggest secret I know about writing: A passionately divided audience is preferable to one that is lukewarm ( Read more... )
