Deep Sky Anchor

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”

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”

Spouse: “When I bought a new mouse, I made sure to get one with a tilty-wheel.”

Me: “Tilty-wheel…” Continue reading “Tilty-Wheel”

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”