It’s taken me a while to pick out the thing I miss most about Girl Guides, and that is the opportunity to try new things every week.
Here is something a writer like me — who plunges headlong into exciting made-up situations but hates thinking of all the ramifications — hears a lot from her critique partners: I didn’t get it. “I didn’t get it” is a frustrating critique, not because it isn’t useful but because, well,…
(Thanks to all who’ve expressed their sympathies! Your kind wishes mean a lot to me.) A while back, I wrote this blog entry about a certain love-triangle pattern often encountered in fiction, and I talked a bit about why I’m frustrated by the place it leaves for the women ostensibly…
The older I get, the less I find myself impressed by comedic movies and plays. Maybe I’m prematurely an old fogey, but everything seems… derivative. Tired. Worn out. I notice that I turn more and more to the game-changers, the household-name originals like classic Looney Toons, Monty Python, and Terry…
One of the reasons C. S. Lewis is such a delightful writer is that he’s good at making insightful studies of a topic often treated with saccharinity or cynicism: how people think and behave when they’re trying to be good. He paints excellent portraits of intelligent minds trying to come…
But first: apparently, I have an Internet kindred spirit on Cracked! OK, so what do I mean by a “story about storytelling”? There are lots of stories in which characters tell stories to one another, from the trivial type like, “Let me fill you in on the entire plot up…
Around this time last year, I made a list of 10 things I’d learned during 2009, and, at the end, I appended a list of 10 things I hoped to learn during 2010. Well, 2010’s been and gone, which means it’s time to see how I did. As a wise…
Dear TV producers, writers, showrunners, etc., Although I don’t watch much of your work lately* (sorry, it’s not you, it’s me), I noticed that you have a problem that seems to span genres, timeslots, and ratings. Eventually, the premise of your long-running series gets stale; you feel like you’ve done…
If your high school English class was similar to mine, you probably learned something about The Great Chain of Being. This, we were taught as we drummed impatiently on our copies of whatever Shakespeare play happened to be on the curriculum this year, was an Elizabethan concept of the order…
Normally, I post about trivial things, like thoughts on books, movies, and video games I happen to experience, or photos of things I’ve been doing, or rants about ideas and fan reactions encountered while watching House, M. D. Occasionally, I post my musings about more important things, like religious, philosophical,…