I’ve been thinking about condoms a lot lately. I can’t figure out whether or not to use them. I want to prevent pregnancy and heaven knows I don’t want to promote the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, but condoms have a tendency to get in the way and create awkwardness and I can’t really figure […]
The fundamental building block of story is change over time. This change is tracked through characters. We take care to craft characters who initially have flaws and strengths readers will connect with and then we create huge messes over the course of the story to generate change in these characters. But what kind of messes […]
One of the first books I ever wrote takes place on a pirate ship in 1725. The 1725 part is important, because that was the end of the Golden Age of Piracy and several countries were combining their efforts to hunt down the last of the big-name pirates; specifically, one of the pirates in my […]
“Hey, girl! Break free of the chains of the ‘virgin/whore’ dichotomy and get in touch with your power and sexuality! Um, you’re ultimately going to have to die for it. But you’re OK with that, right?” This is the way it was in literature (and sometimes in life) for women for a long time. Any […]
This month I found myself, in the midst of reworking a story, wondering why I bothered. There are times when this feeling surfaces in me where I think of the long hours I put into my art, my craft, and wonder if the balance of a story’s existing is worth the effort. Wouldn’t my time […]