With the spring conferences done and the summer tour looming, it’s been kind of quiet here in the Tower. I’ve enjoyed this uncharacteristic spell of Not Traveling, being able to settle in and bake things and write things and… cough my lungs out? Stupid bronchitis. This is why we can’t have nice things. Fortunately that’s…
Blog
In which I run my mouth on someone else’s blog
I am part of the latest roundup on Sean Taylor’s Bad Girls Good Guys blog (and shush, I’m totally a good girl.) We’re talking about reading as children and how it affects us as adult readers and writers. I ran my mouth for a while (I know that shocks you) and I may expound on…
A haunted swamp, a dancer and the Angel of Death…
It sounds like the opening of a joke, but there are three new items up for order (or preorder) this month! First: We are now accepting preorders for Dreadmire, the 15th anniversary edition of my first quest fantasy. It’s a dark one – not for the kiddos – and I’ve always had a great fondness for…
March 2024 Linkspam: Return to the swamp
In the late 2000s, I wrote a media tie-in novel titled Dreadmire. It was a dark fantasy adventure tied to a d20 RPG published by Spellbinder Games, sourcebook by Randy Richards. The medievalesque high fantasy Randy created was inspired by the ecology and culture of the Louisiana bayous, and I found it a fascinating setting. I…
BookNotes: Don’t say race
PEN America is fighting against six pending pieces of legislation that will seriously curtail free speech on college campuses. Florida – oh Florida, why is it always you? – isn’t satisfied with “don’t say gay.” Now they’re saying teacher education programs can’t teach college students anything related to racism or identity politics, which of course…
February 2024 Linkspam: The First Duty
I have traditionally taken January off from public appearances and traveling, in an increasingly vain attempt to maintain my sanity. That means January is usually pretty quiet. In this case, it was quiet, gray, and very very cold. January is not my favorite month. However, I have AWP to look forward to! The annual conference…
BookNotes: Nevermore
Today’s top read: The Estrogen Zone, or how women pioneered creative nonfiction before it was even a thing. All the way back to Nellie Bly, women like Joan Didion, Rachel Carson, Gail Sheehy, and others had to deal with the most rank sexism to fight their way out of the “flamingo pink” women’s pages…
Booknotes: Gang aft a’gley
Technically Jan. 25 was Burns Night, when Scotsmen and literature nerds throw dinner parties on the birthday of poet Robert Burnes. It’s traditional to play bagpipe music, recite the Selkirk Grace, serve haggis, drink scotch, and other Scottish-type things. I’ve never actually attended a Burns Night, but my local coffeehouse is hosting one on Sunday…
BookNotes: AI and book banning, once again.
This week’s roundup in book news is pretty much all AI and book banning, but we do have some fun stuff first: • A postdoc teaching associate at Northwestern University believes he has found about 20 stories and poems he believes were authored by Louisa May Alcott, previously unknown. They were ghost stories and even…
The One Where Elizabeth Wins
I’m honored to share that I’ve been awarded an AWP Community Scholarship to attend the 2024 conference in Kansas City. I was lucky to attend last year’s conference in Seattle, and I absolutely loved it. AWP is one hell of a conference, with about 25 panels per hour aimed for writers and writing programs. It’s…