Tracy Townsend lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois and teaches English at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. She has studied at DePauw University, the National University of Ireland (Galway), and DePaul University, where she obtained degrees in English, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric. She is a member of the Science Fiction Research Association and other academic organizations, which allows her to write very long things and read them aloud to people who are obliged to behave politely. Her sf/f writing draws on her experience as a lapsed Catholic, assistant martial arts instructor, comics fangirl, tabletop role-player, and obsessive hound for obscure mythology. Inexplicably, other uses for that resume have yet to present themselves. Her work is represented by the effortlessly elegant and classy Bridget Smith of Dunham Lit.
Tracy devotes time she doesn’t have to cooking, gardening, writing, and seriously pondering the treadmill in her basement. She is married to her high school sweetheart, with whom she shares two remarkable children. They are – naturally – named after characters from books.
You can find Tracy on Twitter (@TracyATownsend) more often than she really ought to be.
Stories
Blog Posts
- The Position Will Remain Open Until the Job Is Filled
- The Cave, Rey, and the Self-Made Heroine*
- The Mothers and Motherboards: Disembodied Parenting in Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit
- Wakanda Is Not Your Genius Bar
- “They Died and They Died”: Writing Combat for Character and Scale in SFF
- If You Build It, They Will Whump (or Ship, or Squee)
- The Devil in the Details: The Right & Good Virtues of Making A World Bible
- [Not] Just One of the Guys: Gender, Mental Health, and Women’s Strength in SFF
- Measured and Found Wanting: Failure as Characterization
- Dialogue in SFF and Beyond (Part Two): Terms from Your History Notebook & Other Smart Reader Things
- Dialogue in SFF and Beyond (Part One): The Talking Heads Will Get To This Later
- The Notorious CPG: A Tribute to Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Resisting Bad Faith
- “Is This A Kissing Book?”: Beyond Allocentric Relationships
- No Country for True Scotsmen: Reading to Be a Better SF Writer
- Storytelling Beyond Spoilers
- Fear and Loathing in Your Writing Process
- The Thirty Thousand Word Pyramid
- Why You Can’t Just Kill the Dog
- Sometimes They’re Just Evil, Brett
- Festivus for the Rest of Us: Building Holidays in SFF
- On Loving Problematic Things
- The Kids Aren’t All Right
- The Backstory Is In the Basement
- Have I Told You Lately?: Nonverbal Interaction In Fiction
- On Passing the Torch: or, You Can’t Make Them Love Things the Way You Do
- The Chain of Consequence: Character Agency in Fiction (and Bedtime)
- My Little Pony: When “Friendship” Is Toxic
- Avengers, Assemble!: Reading Teams & NaNoWriMo Revisions
- The Machine, Stopped
- We Can Rebuild You: Fanfic and Character Development
- “Soon May the Wellerman Come”: Lived-In Worldbuilding in SFF
- The Triggering Townsend: On Writing the Actual Subject
- The Zeigarnik Finish Line: Tricking Yourself Into Finishing Stuff
- When the Student Becomes the Master
- The Book of Boba Fett: When Your Idea Isn’t a Story
- The Return of Problematic Things
- We Need to Talk About Luisa