Category: Blog

My childhood was perfectly framed by the Star Wars original and prequel trilogies — I was taken to Return of the Jedi in the theatre at 10 months old and promptly fell sleep when Jabba came onscreen; Phantom Menace came out when I was a senior in high school. Continue reading “Star Wars”

Here’s the thing about Howard the Duck—as far as I can tell, people must mostly hate it because they’re squicked by the very tame human/duck romance, because it’s otherwise a pretty standard 80s movie.

BUT that duck is WAY nicer to the human lead than any of the human men are. Continue reading “Howard the Duck”

When someone says something you know to be blatantly wrong, there are different ways to react…

—roll your eyes
—smile politely and move on
—explain your own position

Or if you really respect them…

—stop and wonder, have I missed something? could I be the one who’s wrong?

Continue reading “Disagreement and Respect”

This year, Furry Book Month crept up and surprised us, so we didn’t have anything prepared.  However, now that we’re down to the last day — which is also Halloween! — we have two new furry stories to present, and since one is about a haunted cafe and the other about a werewolf in space, we’ve packaged them up with two new ghost stories to create a spooky Halloween issue! Continue reading “Sweet Spooky Treats”

Well, I’ve now watched all of Veronica Mars. I have extremely mixed feelings about that show. There is a lot of misogyny baked into it… but Kristen Bell is awesome and elevates the central character even when the show consistently punishes and isolates her.‬

There are two big ways to express misogyny — one is to actually express the underlying contempt for women that runs through so much of society. The other is to simply leave women out. Continue reading “Thoughts on Misogyny Inspired by Veronica Mars”

Look, before you all assume that there’s no point to re-booting The Princess Bride, let me just say this: the dread pirate Roberta. Everything else the same, but lesbian love story.‬

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Reboots are just fan fiction that are allowed to make money.

Sometimes looking for more words in my brain feels like trying to scoop the goop out of the bottom of a pumpkin with an iced tea spoon.

That feeling when you have some coffee, but it’s too bitter, so you pour some hazelnut syrup into it… but it pours too fast, and now the coffee is far, far too sweet, and at no point was it actually drinkable, and you remember that, really, you just don’t drink coffee.

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.”‬