Author: marylowd

I’ve found it really useful in my writing to just get in the habit of doing the thought experiment of gender-flipping basically every character before settling for sure on their gender. I just ask myself with every character: would the story be different if I gender-flipped this character? How? Would it still work? What would need changing? And then, finally, which way is more interesting? Continue reading “Gender-Flip Exercise”

The six-year-old, singing quietly to himself, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees. And we’re too busy singing to put anybody down.”‬

‪A slight pause, followed by the six-year-old interrupting his own song with the observation, “They are pretty busy singing. That’s true.”‬

Sometimes my brain constructs new versions of Scream while I’m asleep. Technically, this is nightmares — a masked serial killer tries to murder me. But I like the Scream franchise and didn’t mind.‬

‪Until my brain started including my kids.‬

‪There’s a reason there are no small children in Scream. ‬

That feeling when you’re listening to rare music by an artist you like, and you keep turning it one notch up and then one notch down, trying to find a magical volume level at which it’s actually good… and yeah, that’s probably why it’s rare…‬

Wow, my teeth-crumble-in-my-mouth nightmares have gotten stubborn.‬

‪Generally, if my teeth crumble, I know it’s a dream, so it’s over soon. In the latest though, I kept explaining how I must be dreaming all the way through a hospital trip.‬ Continue reading “Crumbling Teeth”

That feeling when you’re trying to pace yourself on a long project but also push yourself to write as fast as you can, and you can’t seem to agree with yourself on a leadership style for dealing with yourself.‬

The more I see of pandas, the more I love them.

Look, pandas are just really lovable.

I’m approaching the end of Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and I’m just totally baffled about how they’ll give it a satisfying end, given that it’s a prequel to a movie that’s set post-gelfling genocide and mid-podling genocide.‬

‪That’s a challenging mark to hit.‬ Continue reading “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance”

That feeling when you’re trying to balance the names of the characters in a space opera novel so that they don’t all start with the same letter, and you end up staring at a bunch of letters, shuffling them around, until written language doesn’t mean anything anymore…

That feeling when you’re tempted to write an essay explaining how Heathers is a better musical than Les Miserables. But there are probably better uses of your time, so you try to let the feeling pass.‬