You know what’s fun? Spending an hour writing your newsletter copy, only for a glitch to eat the whole thing. That kind of fits with how things are going these days, doesn’t it? Pretty WEIRD… I know the world is burning down and reading your Facebook feed is enough to leave you hyperventilating into…
Category: linkspam
January 2025 Linkspam: Happy New Year!
Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. — Samuel Clemens Remember when I said I greatly regretted taking on such a huge class overload for the fall? Well, it pretty much ate me for the last two months of 2024, and one of the things that fell through the cracks was this newsletter. So…
October 2024: This newsletter was not created by AI
It seems everywhere I go, I’m plagued with AI. Cribbing term papers is not a new invention; since the first teacher scratched out the first assignment on a stone tablet, Krog and Ug were sneaking peeks at each other’s slate. But AI has taken avoiding the work of writing to a new, shiny level, and…
September Linkspam: It’s in the syllabus
Holy late newsletters, Batman! Remember when I told you folks that I was a tad overcommitted for the fall? I wasn’t kidding. I ended up with nine classes at three universities for the fall, and that’s at least three to four more classes than any sane person should try to teach and four to five…
August linkspam: Back to school even though it’s summer
When I was a kid in Massachusetts, school started after Labor Day. I was floored when my family moved to Baltimore, where classes began at the end of August, and then to Tennessee, where school inexplicably opened by the middle of August and where did my summer go? I have friends whose kids are now…
June 2024 Linkspam
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…
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…
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…
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…