Category: Blog

One of the hardest parts of working on Otters In Space 4 is letting all the lessons I’ve learned about how to write “well” over the last sixteen years fall away, and let myself just write down what I know about this amazing little universe I’ve made.

Otters In Space has always been about telling the reader what’s going on with the cats & dogs, the politics between them, and the changes in their world. I’ve learned in the last 16 years to encode those kinds of messages in scenes where you show what’s happening… but… Continue reading “Don’t worry about telling vs. showing…”

For more than a year and a half my five-person bubble has functioned completely smoothly when it came to risk assessment and choices about how to engage with the outside world. The three adults were all on the same page, and we hardly had to even talk about it.

And then delta… Continue reading “Delta and Risk Assessment”

I need to finish this short story I’ve been working on so that I can go back to focusing on a novel.

I love writing short stories… but you can’t lean on them the same way as a novel. While writing a novel, that world and those characters are there for you the whole time. Continue reading “Interrupted by Short Stories vs. Leaning on Novels”

My husband, holding a skillet containing only egg whites:

“I cracked an egg and got a double yolk. Then I brought it to show you, and the yolks went sliding off… and the dogs got to eat a double yolk. Signs suggest today is a weird day.”

The kid was interested in watching Halloween, so we watched 1, 2, 20, and 2018 over the last four days.

The first two were interesting pieces of film history, and despite flaws, I enjoyed the survivor-woman-revenge quality of 20 quite a bit. But I think 2018 is skippable. Continue reading “Halloween & Scream”

I walked past a tree overladen with tiny yellow plums.

My mom brought over tomatoes from her garden.

Not realizing I’d whimsically brought home plums, my husband mistook them for a variety of cherry tomato.

The 14-year-old, utterly confused: “Why are there plums in the salad?”

It’s truly amazing how much easier it is to write when the rest of my family gets out of the house.

Part of me doesn’t miss writing in coffee shops, because it’s nice to use my desktop with a wide monitor and all my little toys set up around it, without having to pack everything up.

And yet… it was so much easier to be productive in a coffee shop.

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”