It is truth universally acknowledged that books are long. Even the short ones (from the ants-in-the-grass perspective of an author trying to crawl from chapter one to “the end”) are spindling, winding paths, easy to get lost within, full of details begging to be forgotten, continuities pleading to be turned into snarls of error. Try […]
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Every teacher has their peccadilloes. One of mine is my abhorrence for calling diverse groups of people “guys.” This hatred gets a workout any time I observe a peer teacher’s class or listen to my students attempt to start presentations, forever defaulting to shouts of, “Guys, hey guys!” to draw the room upright and into […]
As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking to my students about failure—what it is, and isn’t, and why it has value. Often, I find myself paraphrasing this story from Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure, about a councilman advocating a promotion for a man who had previously disgraced himself. Confronted with the question of why […]
When last we left you, my stalwart heroes, heroines, and genderqueer unicorns, I was writing about the life-hacks used by some well-known sff authors in writing effective dialogue. You can use these tricks to help get words on the page (consider Caroline Yoachim’s bracket-and-move-on-hack) or to improve their tone, pace, character, and style (as Sarah […]
In my work as a teacher and author, I’ve found few things more polarizing for readers than dialogue, excepting perhaps how to spell the word itself. (I am “Team Dialogue With a UE,” though I respect those who prefer its amputee cousin. Sort of. It’s a clash of worlds that may never rise to the […]
There are few writers whose name creates as immediate and profound a sense of recognition among my students as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s. I would be surprised if it were any less the case. It’s not just that nearly every one of my teaching colleagues includes “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman’s disturbing tale of a young woman […]
Years ago, I worked as an assistant martial arts instructor. This is an excellent fact to share in a moment of seeming far-off reverie when one’s foundations of British lit students are raising inexplicable ruckus. Give them half a moment to process the fact and you’ll be able to hear a pin drop. Human beings […]
I have a confession to make. Honestly, it’s a confession that shouldn’t be hard for a fan of sff to make in 2018, but there’s still value in coming out publicly on the right side of an issue: I love fanfic. I encourage my students to write and read fanfic, for all the reasons so […]
When LSQ offered me a seat at their blog’s table and let me choose any theme for my recurring column, “A Place Where It Rains” came to mind immediately. It’s a reference to Italo Calvino and his assertion that “Fantasy is a place where it rains,” a gloriously simple way of saying speculative worlds must […]
