Take Your Time
It wasn’t so long ago that I was a person who kept her calendar in stone. I did not flake, bail, ghost, disappear, get busy, or “forget.” If I said I was going, I went. Period. End of story. I was that…
YA Wednesday: Creepy Sleeping Beauty, Fairytales with Fierce Females, Irrational Fears from Books, YA Magical Realism, @PaperbackParadise
Today for YA Wednesday I’ve gathered some scary story links. I don’t scare as easily as I used to, but I still remember how frightened I was by the first ghost story I read. It had something to do with…
Friday Feast: Book Sales and Fails, the “Hollowness” of Diversity, When Agents and Editors Don’t Identify with Characters, and the Seven Deadly Sins of Public Readings
I’m back from a whirlwind trip to Buffalo for Dyngus Day, a post-Lenten holiday that involves pussy willows and polka. But really, it’s about drinking and eating lots of pierogies and kielbasa. Much as I enjoy spending all my free time with…
How Real Crimes Influenced My Fiction
This post first appeared on Jungle Red Writers in September 2015. I’m from a small town. East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Population: almost 11,000 when I last lived there. That was 1993, the year I graduated high school. A half-year earlier Kent…
YA Wednesday: Killer YA Titles, the YA Canon, YA on Sexual Assault, True Crime YA, Quiet YA
I’m a sucker for a good list if it involves cats, corgies, animated gifs of celebrities, or FOOD, especially mac and cheese or chocolate. I don’t even want to think about how much time I waste googling lists in cyberspace…
Without Geography You’re Nowhere: Why Setting Matters
We are awash in narrative. It arrives on every platform in ever-shorter form. (A Little Life not withstanding.) Which has me wondering, who has the time to dwell in a Brontë moor? And what’s the pay off? Setting: A History…