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
I must have repressed the memory of this stage of writing Ryswyck; in fact I know I did, because I blithely assured myself it wouldn’t take so long to write the second book in this ‘verse now that the ‘verse itself was properly realized. And that’s true so far as it goes. But I forgot
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
I want to say at the outset that I ended up really enjoying this book and gave it four stars on Goodreads which has become kind of my standard for “damn good but not life-changing” and did I mention that stars are stupid ways to rate books? Anyway, I’m saying all that because the criticisms
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
Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on my stoop waiting for my ride to pick up my car from the mechanic (I hope and expect that purchasing new tires will be the last major expenditure involved in getting a new car), when an Amazon truck trundled to a stop in front of my building. Turns out
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
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
It’s a thoroughly rainy Saturday: perfect for writing. To be honest, it hasn’t been one of those dancing-through-meadows-of-daisies kinds of months, at least as far as writing mojo is concerned. Nevertheless, I did complete the chapter I started before the whole “white nationalist attempted coup” thing, sent it to beta, and started storyboarding for the
So we are well away into the New Year, and I have sat down with The Lantern Tower again, determined to make the most of my favorite season for writing in. As usual I had bogged down right about the point where I’d be starting to build connective tissue between the first section and the