I think this parable might originally be Taoist. I can’t actually remember where I heard it. Here’s how it goes: Once there was an old man who lived in a village with only his son, who was known by the other villagers to be particularly wild and restless and insubordinate. Read more…
“You can’t tell white people a story about white people and expect them to understand.” A girl I dated almost twenty years ago — a wonderful, strong, brave woman of color — told me that. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I remember that I was the white person Read more…
Hello, friends. How have you been? …Pretty good?… I’m glad! Oh — how have *I* been?? Well, funny you should ask, actually, because there’s a LOT going on in my life right now. While I suppose we are all busy all the time these days, last Sunday, I completed a Read more…
A lot of the people around me are bleeding right now. This new Trump-Pence administration our collective short-sightedness and apathy has created in the United States is already leading to a maelstrom of troubling consequences. I get Washington Post pop-ups on my computer, and besides the OH MY GOD PLEASE Read more…
Thank you, KStew. I’d just like to say that, briefly. Queer women the world round sort of cocked their heads like curious RCA dogs when they found out you were dating a girl. I’m not sure if I can endorse you as an actress or as a writer (although your Read more…
Over the Christmas holidays, I traveled to my ancestral home of rural Missouri. And when I say rural, I mean really, really rural. I mean the roads are all still dirt, just like they have been for as long as anyone can remember, and I mean that your nearest neighbor Read more…
I’m going to start this post with another copy & paste from author Chuck Wendig, whose blog I love oh-so-very-much. (It might be the only blog I actually read on a regular basis.) Except this little excerpt isn’t by Chuck, it’s by his friend, author Andrea Phillips. Here’s the excerpt: Read more…
I wouldn’t really say that I get writer’s block. I fully believe in Stephen King’s quote about how “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I also believe that the best cure for not knowing what to write is to Read more…
I admit it. I’ve been on a real tear lately. Here’s what I’ve done in the past 30 days: I published To Have Loved & Lost I joined about fifty million Facebook lesbian book / author groups I started a mailing list I’ve written 22,000 words of a follow-up novel Read more…
I read this article online today that kicked off a storm of raging guilt. To summarize: So basically, you are taking these characters and putting them into a new world that the writer created, with new circumstances and settings. Now this is where it gets tricky. How alternate can a universe Read more…