So Neil Gaiman—a writer whose success and public image make him a hero to many aspiring writers—tweeted this: It got noticed. Clarion is a workshop for science fiction and fantasy writers, taught by successful established authors in those fields. Its also expensive, long (five to six weeks), and so beyond the reach of a great many aspiring authors. To quote … Read More
Book Review: How To Be a Heroine
I don’t write a lot of in-depth book reviews these days. Part of it is practical: with three kids home for the summer, a novel due by the end of the year, and assorted smaller projects, there just isn’t time. I do always give a star rating on Goodreads; Amazon is a non-starter these days, given their arcane rules for … Read More
Guest blog: Curious Research and Sightings of the Modern Day Faery
At this year’s Pagan Unity Festival (a.k.a. PUF) I met Kiki Dombrowski, who conducted a workshop on the history and persistence of stories of faerie folk. She was also kind enough to write a guest post for me about this very topic. *** Faery sightings are not so out of the ordinary after all. Tales of real life encounters with … Read More
The Music of Release Day
So today, the third Tufa novel, Long Black Curl, hits stores and devices. The pre-release reviews have been good ones, and that’s always a comfort. But the finally judgment really comes from the people who buy it. Hopefully, you. Like Wisp of a Thing, the prior novel in the series, this book also features song lyrics by contemporary indie artists. Here’s … Read More
Interview with Melanie Stone and Nicola Posener from Mythica
Two weeks ago I reviewed Mythica: A Quest for Heroes, the first in a projected five-film epic fantasy series. As well as being a great little film, it was notable for having two female characters as the driving forces of the story, with neither sidetracked into any obligatory romance. The two actresses who played these roles, Melanie Stone and Nicola … Read More
Interview: the writers of Carmilla
Carmilla, J. Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871 novella that predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is a seminal work of genre fiction. It introduces the idea of the lesbian vampire, something that later writers would expand into its own genre (check out Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers for a fairly faithful, if overtly sexed-up, version). It’s also surprisingly contemporary in its writing style. So … Read More
Movie Review: Mythica, A Quest for Heroes
Back in 2011, I stumbled on Arrowstorm Entertainment’s Dawn of the Dragonslayer, a low-budget fantasy epic that had the look of a much more expensive film. But what really got my attention was the care given to the performances: leads Richard McWilliams and Nicola Posener really dug into their characters, and director Anne Black gave them the time to do … Read More
Dramatics Interreptus
My younger son turns seven in about a month, and the other day I realized that I was about that age when I realized just how important stories were to me. My parents left me to stay with friends of the family for an afternoon; I have no memory why. But while I was there, I started watching the TV … Read More
Seeing It a New Way
In my teen writing class at the Mount Horeb Public Library last week, we segued into discussing Catcher in the Rye, and one of my students made the following observation (which I’m paraphrasing): Some of my friends have said that, since the characters in the book were rich, Holden’s problems weren’t that significant. But in so many other books I’ve read, … Read More
A True Story of Frog-Gigging and Disappointment
I wrote the following piece for a memoir class taught by Michelle Wildgen, best-selling author of Bread and Butter and You’re Not You (soon to be a movie starring Hilary Swank). When I was a kid growing up in rural Tennessee, my dad determined that I would follow in his footsteps and leave a trail of dead small animals behind … Read More