November is National Novel Writing Month. In case you are fortunate enough not to have heard of this phenomenon basically it is a pledge to finally sit down and write that novel you were always going to, all in one mad dash for one month. The official goal is to Read more…
I started writing short science fiction with an eye for publication in the 1980s. I was sixteen and stupid to think I was ready, but that fact remains: I was an intensely serious writer of science fiction before 1990, as intensely serious as a teenager can be. My angst-filled teen Read more…
No, I don’t normally do movie reviews here. (I keep that on my Female Chauvinist Movie Reviews series on Livejournal.) However, this movie is consuming my brain and I feel like it is a very important case study in story telling, theme and plot. Blanket review above-the-spoilers: This movie, whenever Read more…
“Speaks backward, Yoda does!” was a quip I first heard from a friend my freshman year of college. I can still picture her delighted face and the pleased general agreement and quote-storm her comment brought. Since then, the joke would re-appear about once a year in my life until it Read more…
In college, I took the advanced poetry class (after the beginning and the intermediary) and on the first day the professor asked, “Who here is a poet?” Two or three hands went up. I didn’t raise mine. In booming outrage, the professor asked me and the other non-hand-raisers, “How can Read more…
You’ve seen it before, on Star Trek or an episode of the Twilight Zone, in movies and books and slush pile stories: in this story, the white people are oppressed! Or it’s a matriarchy or in this society it’s normal to be gay and shunned to be straight… etc, etc. Read more…
This will be cross-posted to Analog’s new blog site. My story in the current issue of Analog has the longest history of any short story I’ve written, and is, like its protagonist, a strange creature of thrown together parts. I’ve wanted to be a science fiction writer as long as Read more…