I just finished W. R. Gingell's Masque . (If you haven't read it yet, you should--it's incredibly fun. What sane person wouldn...

Producing something tangible is satisfying. An article, a doll dress, a fancy dinner, a pretty Christmas ornament. Reading books doesn...

I hear that the romance genre sells more books than any other. It makes sense, I suppose. Women like romance. Even I like romance in ...

(Ha! I'm back! I have grandiose plans of posting once a week again here, but I also sort of think that I'm going to write lots of ...

I just noticed that, after a long absence, Christie of the lovely blog Spinning Straw into Gold   has posted again. Away I went to read the...

My manuscript is progressing. Right now I have about 13,000 words, and my modern-day heroine has been successfully kidnapped by a folkta...

It can sometimes seem as though would-be artists (including writers) cultivate chaos, doubt, and drama in their own lives because they thin...

I have been wanting to (a). focus on fiction in a more disciplined way, and (b). be pushed to improve my writing. Over Christmas I deci...

I just finished my Advanced Reading copy (yes, it does make me feel delightfully important to be the recipient of an Advanced Rea...

I am simultaneously reading two books right now. One is Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin (this is a reread for me) and the other is A...

In " Reviewing school books ," Emily points out that, "Among journalists, there have been a number of studies showing up to...

A...B...C...D...E...F...G... No doubt you could. Probably you could write quite a good review while avoiding any other particular le...

1. *** Increasingly, I wonder if brevity is the key to artistry, just as simplicity is often the heart of beauty. Good child...

I have several small thorns in my blogging flesh. One is that the post which Google places in the “most popular” position at the top of m...

The portrayal of female characters in modern books and movies, especially genre fiction, is a narrow one. It is seen as morally imperative ...

Recently I watched the movie Hugo . It prompted me to think about storytelling, and about how difficult it is to create lifelike world...

Our culture’s desire for equality has drastically changed the stories we tell. Even modern editions of Richard Scary’s picture books (...

“You don’t understand,” whined Pettigrew. “He would have killed me, Sirius!”     “Then you should have died!” roared Black. “Died rather ...