The Magician’s Nephew was retcon before retcon became a thing. I remember feeling… disappointed when I finally got this sixth Narnia volume from my Scholastic book order in third grade. Up until now, the timeline had been fairly linear. Sure, The Horse and His Boy threw everything on its head…
This summer was particularly great, and this back-to-school season was particularly rough (thanks, High Holidays + revamping lesson plans + new-to-me-course! Also normal political the-world-is-going-to-hell stuff that I’m sure everyone is happy not to be reminded of again here). But here are 9 things that made the greatness greater and…
I am really lucky: going to a major theatre production in a professional venue is a comfortable experience for me. I’ve had opportunities to go to big-name productions since I was a teenager. But plenty of people haven’t been to a live theatre production before. If you’re one of them,…
C’mon, now, don’t pretend you don’t know what it means to be a Perfect Writer. We’ve all read the six gazillion books… and articles… and listicles of 15 Tweets Only Real Writers Will Get… We know what Perfect Writers do and don’t do. So why is it so hard to…
Four episodes I watched all at once after returning from our honeymoon, four thoughts.
There are terrible, bigoted things happening every day of the Trump presidency — and terrible, bigoted things that have been happening for a long time but only shamefully recently came to the attention of those of us they aren’t happening to. It seems right to feel angry and upset and…
I’ve been thinking lately about how many of the books I enjoyed as a kid are… pretty explicitly awful in the way they treat anyone who isn’t white, straight, able, upper/middle-class, Christian, cisgender, and male. Part of that is because a lot of my favourite children’s literature came from pre-1960s…
Top 10 lists are fun to write. It’s always fun to tell other people your opinions about stuff that doesn’t really matter, and top-anything lists mean that you get to review all the best experiences you had, compare happiness to happiness, and decide which was better. Remembering happiness is a…
I mean, everyone who likes epic, dark, steampunk-y fantasy should watch the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. But for a deeper understanding of writing better, white, Western writers in particular should watch it. Why? Because we often try to write characters from other cultures from a place of privilege, and many…
One of the things that limits me as a writer is how much I enjoy stasis as an audience member. Because many stories in the genres I read and write and watch thrive on epic-scale plots driven by set-piece actions, skilled writers in those genres have to be able to…