Blog post topic suggested by Shelli Snyder A fun way to make your science fiction future world feel aged-into is to include skills your characters have that they can’t use anymore. Maureen McHugh once confessed to me that she was a wizard at hand-focusing microscopes. With an elegant twirl of Read more…
That endings should be “surprising yet inevitable” has been often quoted writing advice (some attribute it to Flannery O’Connor, but I cannot verify that.) My friend and fellow science fiction writer Charles Oberndorf – a more accessible source – said to me in workshop once, “the ending of a literary story Read more…
Remember seeing the Matrix for the first time? How incredibly annoyed you were at the hackneyed plot? No? Just me? Ahem. Yeah, I was the only person in my friend group to leave the movie saying, “That was sooo lame. It’s a plot from a thousand old stories and twilight Read more…
I wrote this blog post shortly after returning from the Clarion Workshop, in August, 2013. A friend is collecting blog posts about Clarion, and that made me seek it out on my old Livejournal. I’m moving it here for her to link, and also to remind myself of that breathless Read more…