Well, here I am on the downhill side of the less-intense summer months. July and August are my downest of downtimes, but September and the start of school rev everything up into high gear again. I had plenty of time to chill out this summer after finally finishing a critique-ready…
Dear self, (and anyone else who needs it) Here it is. You were waiting for it (or at least, I was, for a long time), so please feel free to print out as many copies as you need: This certificate hereby entitles the bearer, ……………..[your name here]…………… to delay responding…
So, here are two things about me that I’m struggling to reconcile: 1. I like to eat and cook lots of different types of food. 2. I am against cultural appropriation. Let me expand on the first. I love trying new foods and flavours, and, once I try something, I…
I’ve accepted that part of what I’m writing is a romance. I mean, I always knew characters would have romantic relations and whatnot, but that doesn’t always make the plot a romance, any more than a death makes it a murder mystery. Anyhow, as I worked on these romance aspects…
(But first order of business these days: EFF NAZIS. Or better yet, NAZIS CAN GO EFF THEMSELVES. I’m not wasting perfectly good swear-words on proud white supremacist garbage scum.) The older I get, the more convinced I am that one of the most valuable high-school experiences for my professional life…
As I’ve said before, gender roles are bullshit. And I feel as strongly as I do about that because I’m a woman who often behaves in ways traditionally designated as masculine and doesn’t behave in others traditionally designated as feminine. Because I’m breaking those norms, my so-called masculine interests are…
Whoa-oa, we’re halfway there! Whoa-oa, 50% through 2017! April through June contains both my most and least stressful times of year. End of semester = ton of marking (imagine a Looney-Toons style billion-ton anvil dropping from the sky). May is full of wrap-up-the-term work meetings, half of which I missed…
I didn’t expect Wonder Woman to make me cry. I have mixed feelings about the movie in general, because (tl;dr for the rest of this entry) I recognize that though specific parts gave me something really important, there are other marginalized folks it doesn’t do right by. I don’t think…
The manuscript I’m working on involves a few places I’ve never seen except on a TV screen — police stations, courtrooms, and jail cells. Until I started these characters’ stories, I tended to set my fiction in places I was familiar with: high school, parks, fantasy lands that bore striking…
Welcome to TWT 247, where we play the best hits of Toxic Writing Thoughts 24/7! The exact way you shouldn’t! Coming up next, we have a few perennial favourites, so throw away your keyboard, embrace self-doubt or overweening arrogance or both (your choice), and, above all, don’t write for the next…