In Second Grade, our teacher said we would Make Books. She had a special book stapler, and a collection of wallpaper samples we could pick for our covers. First we would write out our stories and count the words so she could determine how many pages to give us – Read more…
This week, I had a guest blog on Asimov’s, about writing science fiction poetry in a 14th Century French style. I used notes I wrote a decade ago to teach the Triolet style at SCA events. Reading those notes felt like time-travel, or uncovering a historic artifact in an archeological Read more…
You want to look cute. You also want to not freeze to death. Strangely, women’s clothing seems to be designed to either be cute or not freezing but never both. Maybe it’s an obsession with showing the skin, but whatever. Women’s clothes are categorically made of thinner material than men’s. Read more…
When I first started writing fiction, it felt like everything I wrote was either under 1,000 words or over 10,000… and the short fiction markets prefer the lengths between those two extremes. In fact, different fiction markets have different “sweet spots” for what they want. Some magazines prefer 2,000 word Read more…
In the Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin inserts a passage, a fictional essay about gender among the Gethens. When I read The Left Hand of Darkness the first time, in a Junior High summer, I was deep in love with it, and when reading this passage in Read more…
Gracie and I had never had a birthday party with other kids at it. The most we got was Grandma and Grandpa coming over for cake. We wouldn’t have minded, except kids on TV had birthday parties full of other kids all the time, and then I was invited to Read more…
I’ve written before about the bizarre snobbery in genre fiction, where some genres (science fiction) think they are better than others (fantasy). In the SF community this snobbery usually takes the form of, “That trope isn’t plausible. This isn’t SF, it’s fantasy!” (As though a fantasy magazine would buy your Read more…