Speaking for myself, I am not a fan of the overenthusiastic pep talker. I’d prefer folks put down the pompoms and leave the marching bands alone, choosing instead for some quiet words of encouragement that sounds reasonable to my ear. So in that vein let me whisper in the first anti-rousing sentiment for NaNoWriMo 2011:
You can do this. People finish these 50,000-word projects all the time, and they’re not better than you. Get cracking. Read More…
In my early 30s I joined a rough and tumble flag football league, coached by a two-year veteran of the Lions who’d blown out both knees and still hungered to get back on the field. His frustration at enduring such a short NFL career was often realized in the form of shouting at us, and one of his favorite things to shout about was our apparent lack of dedication to winning. Did I mention he’d been on the Lions? When another team so much as assembled together before a game, he would point at them and then tell us loudly, “They came to PLAY!” Why this is relevant and spoilers after the jump. Read More…
In the shadow of the brouhaha around Chaz Bono’s participation in Dancing with the Stars this season, few have noticed the abject sexism and body policing of Hope Solo, the soccer star who is also a contestant on the show. From the judges’ criticism—that she “muscles” through the dances too much, should be more feminine, and exhibit more sex appeal—to the media response after her performances, the stream of negative commentary has left a former confident woman and accomplished goalie visibly shaken and doubting herself. If Chaz has been talked about in the pop culture arena as not “enough” of a man, then Hope has seen the pain of the other side of that coin, in acting too masculine. And a good chunk of my cynicism wants to see any of the DWTS judges defending a goal from the German Women’s National Team. Read More…
This post originally appeared over on GayYA.org, a great place to talk about all things LGBTQ in young adult literature.
Like many writers I know, I took a meandering path to this writing profession, starting out confident and then dedicating a long decade in quicksand—I think it’s called self-doubt—after which I think I found myself in the center of the earth, and let me just say, it’s hotter than I thought it would be down there. During this long break I suppose I opted to have a sex change, and then I realized that I needed to write about my transition. I didn’t want to relate a tale of anguish and grief. Instead, I focused on the ludicrous situations that popped up as I navigated through gender roles, gathered information on doctors, civil courts, and resources, and klutzed into whatever manhood I now find myself. Where I have ended up as a writer is not where I estimated I’d find myself, but I understand now that all of my wanderlust has made me a much better storyteller. And along the way, I’ve identified my audience in young adult readers, in whatever stripe of gender and sexual orientation (or questioning place) they may be. I now have a good idea of my goals as a writer of transgender and queer experience. Read More…
Once again we’ve passed a doomsday, this one set for October 21, 2011. Well, Hello, October 24. I guess we made it. Hysteria around the Mayan Calendar aside, there are perhaps a few other signs that collectively we’re about to face Armageddon anyway. Here are my guesses, for what it’s worth.
The movie Anonymous—Of course the theory about Shakespeare’s fraud on the world of playwrighting has been around for millennia, but to put it into a blockbuster movie, by the same director who made us all terrified of 2012? It’s got to be evidence that soon we won’t need movie making anymore. Because we’ll be fighting over the last can of succotash in the bombed-out grocery store, that’s why. Read More…
Let’s talk about sex, baby. Or rather, let’s text about it. It’s a frisky fall in Seattle, maybe because nobody can tell the difference between autumn and spring over there until the daffodils pop out of the ground. But there’s a return to a focus on the doctor pairings, right in time for Miranda’s break up with Eli. With fifth year pressure on our merry band of residents, some nookie time may be just what the doctor [sic] ordered. This is all bound to go well, right? Spoilers after the jump. Read More…
I’m not sure on which particular day it occurred to us, or to which one of us, but at some point over the course of Susanne’s pregnancy somebody had the giddy-making revelation that we would soon have the opportunity to dress up our baby for Halloween. We had total control over the nature, cost, and cuteness of the outfit, because how is a 2-month-old going to stop us? It was a dizzying amount of power, really. Over the next several months, we returned to conversations about The Costume. A lion? Maybe a bumblebee. Babies dressed as bumblebees are pretty damn adorable. Or maybe a pea pod, Susanne suggested. I worried it would be too derivative of Anne Geddes’ work with infants, but it stayed in the realm of possibility, which, if I’m being honest, was about as large as half of Delaware. We considered every possible Halloween costume, even ones we’d need to craft together ourselves.
It’s not that we’re big on pagan holidays, although Christmas with the gift-giving and all is pretty spectacular. It’s more of a combination of wistfulness for our own trick-or-treating days, an excitement about the baby having his own fun, and well, costumes.
But of course, idealism quickly gives way to reality, and then crumbles into deception. Read More…
Even small towns as isolated as Walla Walla, Washington, may fall prey to a zombie outbreak at some point, especially given the global nature of travel and commerce. Although only two state highways connect to the city, it does receive regular cargo shipments by truck and by rail, and it does house a working airport with connections to Seattle, a major seaport and airport on the West Coast. Looking at the nature, history, and geography of Walla Walla can help identify concrete strategies for defending against and surviving a zombie attack when it comes to the area. Strengths and weaknesses of the region, and specific tactics will be the subject of the rest of this brochure. Read More…
Like a flailing restaurant patron who has a chunk of beef stuck in his windpipe, I write speculative fiction. It’s a messy process, of combing through research so I retain a kernel of accuracy in the story, say of physics or history, of plot points and character sketches, scratched out, erased, and written over in my notebooks. There are many notecards and scraps of paper tucked into my journals, so many that I tend to break the bindings of lesser-made books. Don’t forget this detail, that sub-theme, this one scene that keeps popping up in my daydreams. I go back, rewrite, reconceive, get frustrated, re-execute, finally feel satisfied.
It could very well be that all of my energy is in vain, and none of it is any good. I think it’s healthy for writers to drink a cup of hubris with a side of humility every so often. There is so little that keeps us honest. Writing is supposed to be sellable, and to make it to the commercial market, it needs to be definable—what’s the synopsis, who’s the audience, is it like any other bestseller out there, what’s the genre? It had better not fit in too many boxes, or the marketing department at the publisher will implode like an old Vegas casino.
Octavia Butler was one of those writers who defied pretty much everything in publishing—its tightness on genre categories, certainly, but also its expectations around audience appeal, topics that could be covered in fiction, and what bestselling authors should look and sound like. Read More…
Let it never be said that Grey’s Anatomy’s writers were afraid of multiple season-long story arcs. We’ve got a few this year, and we’re only a little way into the season, but so far there’s the adoption story line, the Lexie-Jackson affair, the baby angst between Owen and Cristina, and Alex’s plight of isolation. This week, those stories continue, sometimes with a little poignancy, but they mostly took to the backstage, two-upped by the twin moments of us meeting a character’s mother for the first time, and with The Trendsetting Surgery of the Week. Spoilers after the jump. Read More…
Trans/plant/portation 