For what I want to do, I do not do…. That’s an incomplete and out-of-context quote from a 1st-century Roman Jew named Paulus. But it fits. At the very least, it speaks to an insolvable aspect of the human condition. We so often know what good we need to do but can’t get ourselves to …
I am enjoying it very, very much. I think it’s thoroughly true to the spirit of Tolkien’s creation, even when it diverges wildly in details. (I.e. if Jirt aka Jolkien Rolkien were writing it today, I think he would include POC characters and more female characters, if for no other reason than his work wouldn’t …
Yesterday, we celebrated my kid’s 10th birthday with friends in the park. (Um. Let’s just take a moment to note that this small human I helped create, carried around inside my body for the better part of a year, and then expelled from an exceedingly small orifice in my body is now A DECADE OLD. …
BRIEF: finished my Breakfast Club meets Magicians novel first draft. Clocked in at just under 50k words, which makes it more of a novella. Next draft will likely push it into novel territory, but that’s at least 6 months away while I do other stuff. OTHER STUFF: I’ve always regretted splitting Rethana’s story into two …
Okay, y’all’re gonna think the title is extra corny once you figure it out. In related news, it just occurred to me that we’re only a few months out from the 40th anniversary of the movie The Outsiders. And if you’re of my generation (again, I plan to write a longer post about that sometime …
There was a time when I loathed tattoos. This was when I was still my fearful child self, my anxiety-ridden teen self, and my superconfused young adult self. Anything different was terrifying. I know. Welcome To Humanness, right? People with tattoos intimidated the shit out of me. Remember, this was Germany in the ’80s and …
A BRIEF UPDATE
Remember that shiny sparkly new story I did prewriting for last week? Well, that turned into writing a shiny sparkly new story. The working title is THE PERSET PACK, in which “perset” means “breakfast.” Set in my Light-Walkers universe, the story is: THE BREAKFAST CLUB (minus the misogyny and homophobia of that exemplar of ’80s teensploitation) meets Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS. And I’m telling the story from the POV of a weird girl named Anlon, my version of Ally Sheedy’s Allison Reynolds.
And there you have it. I’ve written about 10,000 words so far, and I am having a BLAST.
Okay, so remember when I said a couple weeks back that I’m sitting on four (4) novel-length works (3 novels and 1 short story collection) that each need a relatively small amount of work before going out into the world? It would behoove me to pick one of those and finish it and get it …
Yes. I chose that title specifically to get a certain song stuck in your head. If you’re American or GenX* or both, you’ll know which one it is. You’re welcome. (*I’m planning a near-future post concerning my thoughts on the very American phenomenon of shoving humans of the past 130ish years into boxes labeled with …
So, this is nearly 8 months late, but here are all the books I read last year. 2021 was a great reading year for me. It’s funny — since the pandemic started, all of my bookworm friends tend to fall into one of two categories: they’ve been reading more than they ever have in their …