Teenage Landscape

I recently read Chris Barzak’s debut novel, One for Sorrow. 
I enjoyed it immensely. It was an old-fashioned ghost story, in the sense that it was about a haunting. And in the sense that parts of that haunting were downright oogy. 
The part that really captured me was the landscape that felt exactly like when I was [...]

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Heaven On Earth

I’m really, really, really glad “Parvati & the Snake” was published two months ago.
I just watched a trailer for Deepa Mehta’s new film, Heaven and Earth, and I saw so much in the young wife and the cobra that I felt like I had copied, even though this is the first time I ever heard [...]

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Something new

Yesterday, I tried something new – songwriting.
I am musically impaired. If being able to sing along to the radio was one of the qualifications for getting a driver’s license, I wouldn’t be allowed within fifty feet of motor vehicle even as a passenger.
But M. was having trouble with a song and asked me to fill [...]

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One-horned wonder

Here I am, trying to decide which novel (and I’m not letting on what my choices are) and I wake up in the middle of the night with a sentence in my head. I think, okay, that’s a sentence, and I try to let it go. But the sentence knows where it’s going. 
I get through [...]

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Fast Forward

Wow. Busy week. 
And a train wreck in my head. When I sat down to look at the bloated (16,000 words and not finished) 2-year old story that I promised myself would be my next housekeeping project, I realized:
a) It was way worse than I remembered
b) I didn’t want to do that much work on something [...]

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Cold Hard Facts

 
Sigh. I still say this doesn’t prove anything. Except maybe the quality of the people who use the internet.

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Count Me In On the Side of the Unicorns

Justine Larbalestier, who seems like a lovely person, who writes delightful novels about magic, and who no doubt sparkles with fairy dust even under harsh fluorescent lighting, has a sad, sad, handicap: a predilection for useless zombies. 
Yet, as all right thinking people know…Unicorns Are Tops!
I mean, let’s think about this rationally. What, after all, can [...]

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What’s in a room?

I was critiquing a manuscript yesterday (Hi P&C!) in which a conversation takes place in a writer’s study. I thought there wasn’t enough physical description of this room, this mythical birthplace of creation. I looked around my own desk for examples of detail, and realized that a writers’ room is really rich with possibility — [...]

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