Dark Fiction & Children's Fiction
Dark Fiction & Children's Fiction
So it’s been a month since I last blogged! I knew this, and yet, the month passed in one of those hazy modes that felt like there might have been a week or two buffer thrown in there. It was a “travel” month for me for work, and on top […]
In April I blogged about going with the flow of some time-worn astrological advice to revise some fiction that had been rejected. With Mercury again in retrograde this month, while I got back to work on another dystopia that I’d started but never finished, I found myself thinking about an […]
I am so pleased and proud to announce that one of my favorite short stories has found a home! “Liliya and the Lost Relics of Bygone Futures,” a new take on an old folk tale series, is live over on Soft Cartel. Go check it out! All stories are journeys, […]
Last weekend I completed my first draft of Raccoon Retreat, the sequel to Raccoon Rescue. It came as something of a surprise: writing the book has been a slog, and I thought it might take at least until the end of the month. That’s because for me, endings are almost […]
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 […]
The last year has seen a rather contentious debate over whether sensitivity reading — the practice of having stories critiqued or edited by people who represent the marginalized communities from which characters might come — constitutes censorship. This actually isn’t a new issue. Nearly 20 years ago, Debbie Reese, a […]
I first came across those terms in 2016, when I got involved in my first (and, it turned out, last) NaNoWriMo. “Planners”: self-explanatory. They outline their plots, they work out detailed character descriptions, they worldbuild intricate settings. The idea is that, when they’re taking 30 days to write a 50,000 […]
When I first started to write again a couple of years ago, it was amazing. It felt like the tap would never turn off. The ideas flowed free and plentiful, and it was bliss. That lasted throughout last year’s layoff, when I spent my summer working on a novella that […]