I’m reading a book right now on how to write mysteries. The author is clearly someone who prefers more hard-boiled stuff with lots of sex and violence, as he accuses mysteries without these features of being (respectively) repressed and lacking. (To be fair, if you read between the lines, he…
Whenever I play any game in the Legend of Zelda series, I find myself getting a lot jumpier. Like, I’ll keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corners of my eyes, or, when I go to bed at night, I can’t shake the feeling that something might be right…
What is constructive criticism, and where does it overstep the boundary between “criticism” and “attack”? I’m interested because of this. Let me first make clear that I don’t care one way or the other about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. I read the first book, didn’t like it at all, and…
I love a murder mystery, no matter how cheesy the plot, how stock the characters, or how many times strangers with guilty pasts naively accept a mysterious invitation to an isolated manor house and then decide to split up and search the place when it becomes clear that one of…
One of my playwriting professors at Queen’s once advised our class that the way to tell when a piece of writing you were working on was done was when you no longer felt embarrassed to have other people read or perform it. Sound principle. He then, however, added a caveat:…
Here’s the scoop: I don’t care about good people who do good things for good reasons and are never heart-wrenchingly tempted by evil. Sorry. This explains a lot of my taste in fiction; I’ve never been able to sympathize very much with Lucy and Peter Pevensie, or Harry Potter, or…
Have you ever read a book that entranced you until the very last chapter, when the ending reared up like a brick wall in your face?
Curse you, suitemates, for introducing me to iTunes movie rental service. I may never work again! On the surface, the Oscar-winning film No Country for Old Men and the Dora-nominated show Evil Dead: the Musical don’t seem to have much to do with each other, apart from lots of…
To those who celebrate Christmas: merry Christmas! To those who celebrate another holiday: hope you get whatever you want to get out of your observance! To those who celebrate nothing: want to come to the movies with me? So what is fanfiction, anyway?
So some news first. My short story “A Dybbuk Story” is being published in the Winter 2007 issue of The First Line, and it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Writing it out like that makes me seem so matter-of-a-fact about it, but, truth is, I’m still slightly in…