On Saturday, when #yasaves began to happen in response to the latest installment in the apparently endless series of articles decrying YA literature for being Too Dark, I was, appropriately enough, taking part in a YA-centric book event at Klindts. This amazing independent bookseller filled their store with twelve YA authors. They enlisted numerous zealously [...]
Writing
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I’ve spent a lot of time lately attempting to form beneficial habits, hence the small flurry of cooking and gym-related posts. And I’ve been realizing that when you do something a lot, the activity, whatever it is, begins to fit into your life in a different way. It becomes both less of a big deal and [...]
Some writers, I am given to understand, struggle because they have SO many FABulous iDEas, they just don’t know WHICH one to write FIRST! I am not one of them. My inner critic, who resembles a very angry prosecuting attorney, starts second-guessing before my first guess is fully formed, doing her best to demolish the [...]
I’ve been rereading old journals. If you have old journals (or old blog entries!) yourself, you probably know that rereading them can be an excellent way to identify recurring behavior patterns. I often react by getting frustrated: Oh come on, Self. How many times do you have to LEARN before it sinks in? Seriously, AGAIN you’re [...]
I just sent a contribution to the Nathan Wolfson Trust. If you knew L.K. Madigan, if you were a fan of her work, that is a thing you could do as well. I’m glad I had the chance to meet her through her friend and agent Jennifer Laughran, and glad, too, that we spent some [...]
Ten years ago, I was part of a group planning an event that I couldn’t believe was going to happen until it did: Susan Cooper’s 2001 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture at the Scottish Rite Center here in Portland. It seemed impossible that the person who’d written my beloved, frequently-reread The Dark Is Rising sequence [...]
The other night I went to hear David Levithan read from The Lover’s Dictionary at Annie Bloom’s Books. The Lover’s Dictionary is, as you may know, a novel in the form of dictionary definitions. It was an excellent reading from a concise and elegant book. The book is especially well-suited to readings, since each entry [...]
I put out a call recently for good sources to aid in constructing myths & religion for invented worlds. This was inspired, among other things, by rereading the Earthsea books (backward starting from Tehanu — that experience may get its own post) and being impressed yet again with the density and richness of the world [...]
This may come as a shock, but many writers do not lead lives of adventure and peril. Years ago, I was in a workshop with Pat Murphy, excellent writer and teacher, co-founder of the Tiptree Awards. (And her Wikipedia entry includes the line “See also: Pataphysics.”) Here’s an audio interview wherein she talks, among other things, [...]
Whether or not I travel for the holidays, the end brings a jet-lag, new-time-zone feeling. It’s also a little like moving, since we tend to reconfigure the house significantly to accommodate festivity. My writing desk, for instance, was deployed as a beverage station. I got the desk on May 2, 2009. (I’m able to be this [...]
