After all my anxiety about Covid at WorldCon, I came home healthy and tested negative. Probability, as always, is a jerk and delights in rewarding risk and punishing caution. While I was away, my husband, who has been very careful and staying home, decided to take the car in for Read more…
Every time I finish a writing journal, I start the next one with a list of Works In Progress. These are unfinished things which I genuinely intend to finish (like all writers I have a truly epic pile of never-intend-to-finish story starts, like trays of withered sprouts in an ex-gardener’s Read more…
“We live in a classless society,” I’d been told as a kid in a white suburban school where most of my classmates were from comfortable middle-class families. I’d been told it so many times I regurgitated it myself, in a conversation with my Government teacher, Mr. D. I loved hanging Read more…
Big news: I have made the long list for the British Science Fiction Association Awards – for both Novel and Short Story. Because hey, it wouldn’t hurt if people who vote for awards could actually read things, I have made some uploads! First, in consideration for the BSFA Short Story Read more…
How do you show a character doing something that is inherently non-visual? Many stories hinge on a character making a decision. What does that look like? It can be easy to fall into listing all the options, writing out the consequences as a character’s mental monolog, backing-and-forthing. I’ve read that Read more…
We’re re-watching Gargoyles, a favorite cartoon from my childhood. In the most recent episode, Demona, the Bad Girl Gargoyle, is trying to show how humanity is evil, and one things she shows is a purse-snatching, and she stops her friend from going after the purse snatcher, telling him, “With human Read more…
Other writers frequently ask me how I get so much done, what my schedule or writing practice is like. I decided to actually track my activity for a week and see what it looked like so I was answering honestly. It was a little bit of a weird week, I Read more…