With the publication of Leaving Mundania imminent (May 1 is the official pub date, but a few large online retailers already have it in stock!), I wanted to share a few things I learned while reporting and writing a book
Gaming Read: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Ready Player One: An exhilarating novel about gaming and 1980s nostalgia, but don’t expect too much.
Two Years After Mastectomy
Two years ago, I had my healthy breasts cut off to reduce my sky-high risk of breast cancer. Last year, I wrote a post chronicling my feelings one year out, but two years out, my feelings have changed enough to warrant another (and perhaps final) post.
Leaving Mundania Cover
Behold! The cover of Leaving Mundania has been unveiled. Release date is May 1, 2012. Feel free to mark your calendars.
Harry Dresden’s Life Changes Forever
A sneak peek at the newest Harry Dresden novel.
Preserved: Fresh Salmon, Parts of My Body
Anyone who reads my blog is probably aware that I have an unholy obsession with preserving foods, and that in 17 days I will undergo a life-changing operation, a double-mastectomy with reconstruction done on my healthy breasts. I’ve always cooked,
Nanowrimo Is Making Me Delinquent
Just a little note to say: I know I’m viciously late on my most recent flash, but it’s for a good reason. I took last week off to start planning my novel for National Novel Writing Month, which began on Sunday along with the month of November. I’ll catch up with the aforementioned Superlative exercise as soon as I’ve written my 50,000 words.
How to Read Twilight
Stephanie Meyer needs an editor. I contend that a writer gets one free “career” use of the term “smoldering eyes,” but Meyer uses the verb at least five times, just in Twilight
It’s enough to make an MFA’s eyes fill up with tears, as she collapses sobbing into her unpublished, but smoldering, manuscript.
Of course, my husband and I are reading the book aloud to each other anyway. While individually, our tastes skew to concept sci-fi and literary fiction, our collective taste tends toward middle-brow genre novels featuring vampires, medieval fantasy, or other stuff written for teenagers.
Lizzie Flashes: Superlative Exercise
“The Nicest Kid in the Universe,” is a parable about Franky Gorky, the titular child, for although he is the “nicest” kid, “he wasn’t the smartest kid.” Because Gorky isn’t smart, he doesn’t realize that the moon waxes and wanes on its own; he believes that his wishes are responsible for this, a fact which leads him to run across the street on Christmas morning as his grandmother is parking across the street, and get “rubbed out” by a drunk driver. The story ends with the introduction of a first person narrator and a moral, as if it has been told to frighten a child into good behavior.
Lizzie Flashes: The Neighborhood
My response to last week’s “Restrained Impulse” exercise is below. I have to say, I’m not sure I hewed as close to the exercise as I could have. I wanted to present the story of a gang flunky who couldn’t keep from laughing as a way of replicating Robert Hill Long’s dynamic of a small girl who couldn’t keep from dancing. A flaw in the story, I think, is that my main character doesn’t have a strong relationship with a single person, as Long’s girl does with her father. He also feels a little generic to me