Dark Fiction & Children's Fiction
Dark Fiction & Children's Fiction
This week was one of those that feels like it happened two weeks ago. Was it really only last weekend that #MPRraccoon scaled a tall building and gave us all hope in the ability to survive through sheer tenacity. Yep. It was. Only a few nights later, Rachel Maddow would […]
If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen some of my tweets this week around #MPRraccoon, the young female raccoon who scaled St. Paul’s UBS tower. Unlike (apparently) much of the rest of the world, I was not going to be satisfied with learning that she had simply […]
I’m not much of a superstitious person. I take most everything mystical with a heavy dose of science-based skepticism. (For that matter, I take other things that way, too. I’m not, for example, likely to believe that medication cures all.) And yet. There are not insignificant parts of me that […]
I don’t normally blog about my day job, not least because I already mix genres enough as it is; why add business-to-business content marketing to the jumble? In fact, I’ve thought for a long time that marketing and fiction, for me, make each other better. Fiction makes my marketing content […]
A couple of weeks ago a longtime friend asked me to join her class of 19- and 20-year-old college students to talk about writing as a career. I joined virtually, via Skype, and had a good (if somewhat short) conversation. In fact, it turned out to be an extension of […]
I’ve been spending the last few days in end-of-year reflection and coming-year planning, not that planning ever really works out the way we think — 2017 being a great example of that — but more to get my head screwed on straight about what’s come before and what to expect. […]
I was possibly not the only writer to feel a sense of disquiet when I read about novels not just written by artificial intelligence — but also nearly winning awards. This wasn’t so much (as with so many other jobs, including possibly my marketing day job) a fear of being […]
I’ve been a horror fan since I was a young teen. I can trace it back further, to the fact that my favorite Nancy Drew books all took place in creepy locations, and I adored the original Scooby Doo cartoons that I only ever watched with my cousins. But my […]
In the time of chimpanzees I was a… okay, never mind. Although, 1993, the year Beck’s “Loser” came out, may as well feel like prehistory. That year, I was graduating from high school with a raft of scholarships, including a three-year Air Force ROTC ride. My future looked bright. Needless […]
On Twitter not long ago, Jenna’s Truth author Nadia King tweeted a link to a wonderful short post, “The Detachment of Writers,” by Scottish YA author Abigail Shepherd, who summed up my own lifelong experience: “I often see the more intense parts of my own life as though I’m watching […]