Sara Ryan

I learned two new words: bershon, circuitously via YPulse (by which I mean that YPulse linked to something and that linked to something else and somehow I ended up clicking on this, and rickroll, via Jessamyn. I do not anticipate engaging in rickrolling, but I expect I’ll dig up a bershon photo or several one [...]

Describing the moment when a story first began to take shape:
“…then ensued in my mind what a student of chemistry would best understand from the addition of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colorless solution. It was at first for me a [...]

Handy Tip, courtesy of Shannon Hale and Libba Bray: If you’re in a restaurant and you are in a hurry because you have a signing to get to, use the ketchup bottle as a microphone and begin singing an improvised version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with lyrics such as  “And I need to OR-DER [...]

1. We are hosting a cool cartoonist for the next few months. Since she’s been staying with us, we have cooked at home more than we have in an embarrassingly long time. Yay for the good influence of houseguests!
2. SF! I think I’m going to WonderCon. I don’t have the tickets yet but I think [...]

The sensationalistic title of Sudhir Venkatesh’s book, Gang Leader For A Day, is the only thing about it I dislike. In 1989, ponytailed and fresh from following the Dead, Venkatesh started out as a grad student at the University of Chicago. He wanted to study the impact of poverty, specifically on young black men growing [...]

I’ve been reading Nicola Griffith’s enticingly packaged and very enjoyable memoir, And Now We Are Going To Have A Party: Liner Notes on A Writer’s Early Life.
It’s making me think a lot about, among other things, how to optimize your life for writing. Not just in the obvious ways, like, you know, making time to [...]

Hey, everybody. It’s been a while.
Man.
You go away from easy Internet access for a week and somebody hacks your dang MySpace. For any of y’all who got bulletins from “me” alerting you to the latest horizontal hijinks of a young lady who I will not name, who is famous for being famous, please accept my [...]

I was talking with a friend the other day, saying that writing the long sad post about my father had gotten me thinking about how I’ve been oddly shy and reticent about posting about other things here; things about which I might reasonably be expected to have a certain level of expertise and knowledge.
“Like what?” [...]

Carla Speed McNeil writes and draws the phenomenal Finder series of graphic novels: read the first chapter of Talisman.Geoff Ryman is the author of several extraordinary novels; my two favorites are The Child Garden and Air: read an excerpt.
It was only recently that I realized that there are ways in which their work reminds me [...]

“Friday Five” is the most convenient meme, because despite its origin as five questions you are supposed to blog your answers to, you can instead totally just list five random things. WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT I’M GOING TO DO.
1. Wildfire has the most minimal website I’ve seen since approximately 1996, but at least there’s [...]