So you’ve decided to write a novel! Or a play! Or a screenplay! Or a short story! Or a fanfic with OCs! Congratulations! But unless you are like artsy, and I mean, super-duper artsy, your characters will need names. What to do? Every writer knows that names are important. They’re…
If you check out fanfiction.net, you’ll notice it’s strong fanon that Holmes’s father was abusive to him as a child. Without wishing to minimize real-life child abuse, which is horrible, in some types of (fan)fiction, parental abuse is used as a way to explain a character’s emotional issues or bad behaviour,…
I read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant earlier this month, and it still smarts. (If you haven’t read it yet, fear not: I won’t reveal anything past what you might gather from the cover copy.)
Hey there, 16-year-old self! Hey, 31-year-old self! You probably didn’t expect this back in 2001, but The X Files is back! With a six-episode miniseries. No way! Do Mulder and Scully finally make out? Just kidding, I’m way too embarrassed to admit that’s one of the main reasons I love…
So my mom and I went to get mani-pedis while I was home over the holidays. It’s not the first time I’ve had my nails done, although I can count the total number on the usually un-polished fingers of one hand. Apart from the discomfort of paying a stranger to…
Often, when white writers like me consider how we write about race, we discuss how we write about racialized people. We seldom (with some exceptions) discuss how we think and write about the experience we know most about: that of being white. This is not about the ludicrous idea that white…
So I was gearing up to write about The X Files revival (short version: I think it’s a lot of fun, minus the -isms and -phobias that shamefully pop up on– and offscreen), and then the second episode made me realize that’s not what stuck with me at all. Without spoiling XF…
So I think I’m ready to write about why I disagree with the Sept. 2015 Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The authors, both university professors, claim that requests for “trigger warnings”–that is, warnings about content that may link to students’ own traumatic experiences, such as sexual…
As I work on my current MS, I’ve learned one of my weaknesses: dialogue.
This year, I tried for the second time to play an installment of Phoenix Wright, mystery-solving, case-winning video-game lawyer extraordinaire. And, for the second time, I gave up in frustration close to the beginning of the game. I did this even though this particular game was a crossover with Professor…