I once was at a talk given by S.E. Hinton in which she said that she wrote her fifth novel, Taming the Star Runner, deliberately in such a way that no one would be tempted to try to make a movie out of it. As all four of her previous novels had been adapted to
To mark a year since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine, the journalist Dmytro Komarov released a documentary of his reporting from last February to this. Called simply, “YEAR,” it shows him in a plain train compartment with President Zelenskyy, talking about the year that is past, interleaved with Komarov’s interviews with military and security officers
Hello and welcome to my semi (very semi)-regular series of Warmish Takes: ruminations of impeccable (cough) wisdom on topics that are almost certainly past their sell-by date. Takes that are, let’s say, the quintessence of l’esprit de l’escalier. Today’s take is about representation, particularly where it intersects with creative work and its audience. Now, I’m
So in my summer odyssey of brain fog, I became a bit of a Youtube junkie, because that was a relatively effort-free distraction from my back injury and its sequelae as well as my complete inability to make and carry out plans. (As any ADHD person knows, you have to make a plan to make
Hello and welcome to the newest segment on this here blog, Warmish Takes. There are already plenty of places where you can get Hot Takes, but what yours truly promises here are Warmish Takes, straight off the bat. Mind you, many of my takes are Warmish because it takes me so damn long to string
Ask ten aroace folks what they think about sex scenes in stories and you’ll probably get seventeen different answers. So consider this more a meditation than an assay at representation. Writing always starts with reading. In the olden fandom days I used to complain a great deal about how ship fics crowded out nearly everything
I’m not sure how or why this 2017 essay by Claire Dederer washed up on my Twitter timeline, but it was an interesting and layered read. Its question was: what does one do with the art of monstrous men? And of course, in that #MeToo moment, it was a question on everyone’s lips. And, since
First, go read this amazing essay by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton. I’ll wait. So, speaking of hotel clerks, there once was a man who went to a conference at a hotel whose customer-service motto was “There are no such things as problems, only opportunities.” He went up to the desk and said to the
Some years ago, a priest who was teaching a class I was auditing sat down with me to teach me how to chant a collect. (A collect — accent on the first syllable because it is a noun — is a prayer said by an officiant on a specific occasion to “collect” the prayerful intentions
So that time-dishonored topic of self-insert characters has rolled around on the Birdie App again, and I had Opinions: “I suspect this scorn for authorial “self-insert” has leached into the water supply from the early psychologists and New Critics, who liked to tout the “objectivity” of high art as against art that draws on personal