It's a Jumble

Woot, just finished the last lines of my first draft of a 13,555 word novelette. Longer than I ever meant it to be. Probably unpublishable. Sleep is a willing sacrifice.

I disappeared into a medical writing assignment for a few weeks, then crawled out to find the house in chaos and the hurly-burly of the Christmas season well underway. All the neighbors strung lights in their yards when I wasn't looking; Christmas jingles play in the stores, lights and wreaths and Christmas trees are everywhere. Each year this season sneaks up upon me; this year it seemed to wait till the last minute before jumping out, waving its arms, crying Ha! Gotcha! Did you forget about me? My mind filled with the technical details of a dozen scientific journal articles. . . I nearly did forget. But the Christmas tree is up, the stockings are hung, and tonight was my daughters’ annual Christmas music recital. Both acquitted themselves well, if I do say so myself. My eldest finished a scarf she’d been weaving for me on her little loom kit, and I proudly wore it to the concert and all evening.  Dinner out (barbecue), bath time, bed. . . Outside the nights dip ever de...

On doing great work:  "The real trick to producing great work isn't to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to be." -- from "Nobody Knows What the Hell They Are Doing" by Oliver Burkeman at 99U From writer Theodora Goss’s twitter feed**: “I have rewritten this paragraph at least five times. Which is why wordcount is irrelevant, if they’re the wrong words.” “Authors telling other people how to be authors is like parents telling other people how to be parents. Because all kids are the same.” *Note: I don't know how to use Twitter. I don't know how to cite (?) it appropriately? I just sometimes use the Web to eavesdrop on other people's tweets. A lovely essay on a video game and the Asian-American experience      . . . beca...

On turning 40 and things I've seen and read: Fate/Zero, A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Magicians. Ways to make yourself melancholy during these gorgeous autumn days.  It’s two months before I turn 40. But I’ve been mourning the end of my thirties for the last year. 40 is when you have to recognize, finally, that there are doors you’ve passed which will never open to you; there are paths which are forever blocked. “ Way leads on to way,” as the poet said , and you will never find your way back to that turning point in the golden wood. Of course, I’ve been realizing this throughout my thirties. It’s just that the finality of that number, “40”—the thudding close of a decade—has a new hardness that drives the point home. One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is failure, and of how it is not something talked about in our world. All our cultural narratives are of success. We tell our children that they can do anything, as long as they work hard enough and believ...

A children’s book review: " Petunia, the Girl Who Was NOT a Princess "   by M.R. Nelson My suggested age range: for kids 3 and up Disclosure: I received this book as an electronic advance review copy from the author. Nelson and I have followed each other on social media for some years now, and I consider her a friend. The Petunia of this charming children’s book is not a “princessy” girl. She doesn’t like frilly dresses and pretend princess parties. She would rather climb trees and play ball and build towers with blocks. She feels lonely in a neighborhood where are all the other little girls dress like princesses and seem to prefer more stereotypically “feminine” past times. In the end, Petunia learns a lesson about acceptance. But it’s not the lesson you might expect. Petunia doesn't have to learn to accept herself. She accepts herself and her tomboyish ways just fine. What she learns, when a new princess moves in next door, is an acceptance ...

"I t didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”             --Lev Grossman, from The Magician’s Land Unless you’ve been caught in in an enchanted sleep for the past several years (or just don’t pay attention to book news at all, I suppose) you’ve heard of The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman. “Harry Potter for adults,” it’s been called, as well as both a deconstruction of and loving homage to The Chronicles of Narnia and other classic works of genre fantasy. It’s achieved widespread critical acclaim and popular success. It’s also received the most polarized reviews I’ve ever seen on Amazon and GoodReads. Grossman’s series is a collision of literary tropes with genre fantasy tropes, all told with snarky verve and crackling Whedon-esque dialogue. Some people can’t stand these books. I love them. I LOVE them. I finally finished reading the last installment of the series, “T...

When it rains, it pours. Or something like that. My last story for 2014 came out this week (same week as " Congress of Dragons .") This latest one is " The Berry Girl ," up at Lakeside Circus . A podcast should be coming out soon. It was released just as summer ends, which is fitting as the story is an ode to summer. STORY NOTES (possibly mild spoilers below!) I wrote this story last year, in the thick of summer. The new raspberry bush in our front yard was giving us its first harvest. Every day my youngest daughter checked the bush for ripe berries. It was her greatest delight to pick the berries, bringing them one or two at a time into the house in a little yellow bowl. One morning I was in the shower when my little girl entered the bathroom. She slid open my shower door to proudly show me her harvest--her bowl full of ripe berries. And she sang, "I am the Berry Girl! I am the Berry Girl!" So I sat down to write a story about a Berry...