Author: marylowd

I want to talk about short story contracts, writing “for exposure,” and the inherent contradictions that insidiously poison the writing community.

To start, let me say that I’ve had nearly 200 short stories published in… oh god, I have no idea how many different markets. Continue reading “The Confusing Quantum Nature of the Value of Stories”

“Citizen Joe” is such a transcendently, bizarrely brilliant episode of SG1. It does such an amazing job of capturing the feel of loving a show like Stargate and being a writer taken over by your stories, all without flinching from making fun of itself. Continue reading “Citizen Joe”

Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous is so incredibly ill-conceived.

Let’s send kids to dinosaur murder island! Continue reading “Camp Cretaceous”

I haven’t watched season 4 of Atypical yet, but I’m looking forward to it. And while I’m not interested in deeply debating the quality or lack thereof regarding the show, I would like to say something positive about it… Continue reading “Representation in Atypical”

I’m rewatching Star Trek: Generations for the first time since… oh, I don’t know, high school? And I still hate what they do with Data and the emotion chip.

The way Brent Spiner plays it, it’s like Data becomes a completely different person with the emotion chip. Continue reading “Scattered Thoughts on Star Trek Movies”

I’ve been working on the third book in my third trilogy, and so I was thinking about the parallels between my three trilogies.

There’s one really big striking one — in all three, the third book involves descent into an underwater world. Continue reading “Trilogy Trends”

My house has AC, but I’ve never been somewhere as hot as 106 degrees… so I stepped outside for twenty seconds out of sheer curiosity.

And wow. Continue reading “106 Degrees”

I’m realizing, as I close in on the end of this trilogy, that I’ve never finished writing a book without any future plans to write more books about those characters before. I usually write open-ended worlds, meant to be revisited…

But in my mind, the trilogy that starts with The Snake’s Song has always been specifically a trilogy, and it’s very much a separate world from my other books and stories. Continue reading “The End of a Closed World”

In spite of having written a whole massive tweet rant about how all the white men in Star Trek keep being given their own shows while everyone else is treated as replaceable…

I am so out of my mind excited to see Q come back and torture Picard. Continue reading “Q Returning to Star Trek”

I don’t want to give too many spoilers for a book I haven’t finished writing, but… it’s really fun writing an octopus who wears an otter skeleton like a mecha and loves a gryphon who has a hybrid baby with her that’s basically a little elder god bundle of tentacles and feathers. Continue reading “Working on “The Otter’s Wings””