“What does it matter what I think as long as I’m polite and kind to the person?”
“Because it’s not real. It’s not genuine. It’s performative.”
When blue ink is your therapist
Look, figuring out how to get what you want is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.
I thunk up this bit of wisdom for Magdalene (The Great Mormon Novel™) when I was rasslin’ with this concept way back in 2011. A perusal of my hard drive tells me I’ve been cogitating on this since at least 1998.
How to start a war, part 1
I’m going to air my family’s dirty laundry because the whispers, half-truths, and manipulation that have been levied against my family—particularly my mother, who is innocent in all this—with people who’ve known us 25+ years who’ve believed it and never asked for our side of the story, has pushed me past my limit. So far, I’ve only been setting the record straight privately, and even then I’m not quite believed. Protesting too much is gauche even if you’re right, so I had decided to let it go, but my second-oldest cousin’s snubbing of my mother is the last straw.
You want to slap us in the stocks on the town square, Aunt Susie? Fine. But I have a platform you don’t.
“Twice.”
“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”
I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,1 from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.
That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share opening line.2 Read more
Of trigger warnings, spoilers, and tags
Fiction has many purposes. Entertainment, education, enlightenment, and learning empathy are the big four I can think of right now. Good fiction should do all these things, sometimes without your notice. As you learn and grow, the lessons may get more subtle. Maybe the book is just brain candy,1 meant solely to entertain, and author didn’t mean to do anything Read more
No man is an island
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
De gustibus non est disputandum
While that is true, in general, women’s art is seen with some disdain regardless of what it is, how well it’s done, or in what cultural/societal conditions it’s made, I’ll save you the feminist rant. For now. You’re welcome. Read more
I have wisdom to impart
I’ve been writing a long time, ~fifty years, from when I was about five and started telling my ADHD-addled brain stories to put myself to sleep. I started writing real-person fiction (although I didn’t know what that was1) in fifth grade with a short story we were assigned and kind of just put my teacher in shock that it was so good—and that I’d dared to use a classmate’s real name. It really was good, especially for a fifth grader. Wish I still had it.
I chugged along through my teens, wrote some RPF wish-fulfillment I destroyed because my dad found a book proposal2 that disturbed him so he gave me an ultimatum: Let him read it or destroy it. Read more
Subdivisions
Justice had spent Saturday strolling around her lovely new neighborhood, marveling at the luscious lawns and tree-lined streets.
She had been walking on a concrete sidewalk in the shade of old trees. She could reach out and touch the feathery pink tufts of a mimosa tree. She could drag her fingertips across landscaping bricks. A soft breeze lifted her short curls and she could smell flowers and barbecuing and chlorine instead of cow shit. She could hear motorcycles and cars, screeching and splashing, lawn mowers and sprinklers.
She lived in a subdivision now. She felt something welling in her chest she couldn’t identify. It was almost too good to be true, but this wasn’t surreal like graduating from school to half-million-Monopoly-dollar job offers. It was normal, living here. ordinary. Like the new clothes that fit well and flattered her and lifted her out of the realm of poor country girl. Their plainness, this ordinariness was a gift Knox didn’t know he’d given her.
When she came upon the clubhouse with the pool and the attendant asked for her address, then gave her a pass to the gate, she found herself choking up. “Thank you,” she whispered, looking down at it.
I am unable to even
When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 4 of a series
Angel & the Mambokats
MAMBOPUSSYKAT
by Angel & the Mambokats
Genre(s): American Afro Cuban jazz,1 Afro Cuban soul,2 mambo, Latin, dance, ballroom
Mood: vintage/retro, midcentury Read more
Never apologize
When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 3 of a series
Once upon a time when I thought I was edgy
When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 2 of a series
Magdalene: a contest and a prize.
03/28/2011
[link removed]
Older, more tired
When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 1 of a series
Tidbits
Long ago, I went on a road trip with some friends to the Redneck Riviera. There were lots of things wrong with that trip including a severe sunburn, but I had fun.
We were at a bus stop in New Orleans where there was a girl about our age, mid-twenties, standing alone, waiting for a bus. We struck up a conversation with her. She was coming home from work or … something. Don’t really remember.
The Proviso, 3rd edition: A confession
It’s been seventeen years since I first published The Proviso, and a very hard ten since I put out the second edition. I can’t stop fiddling with these characters and I can’t stop feeling like I’ve missed something that will make the story richer.
My kids are grown and gone now, but not without a rough few years. Menopause has changed me in ways that have made me a stranger to myself—one I don’t like. My mother went through a medical scare that introduced a great deal of drama into my very large, previously drama-free family, which I never thought could happen. It’s not as intriguing in real life. I’m long past the pack’s age, and they are forever frozen in time. Read more
How to archive your Pinterest account to your hard drive (relatively) quickly
UPDATE 2025-04-04: This no longer works. Use WFDownloader (although the dev is awfully prickly) and follow the instructions.
And I do mean relative, but for a while, I was doing it one image at a time.
Now, how you organize your hard drive is your business, but I created folders and mimicked my board names.
The Cult of Traditional Publishing Part 4: Da Rulez
The Cult of Traditional Publishing Part 3: What do you really want?
The Cult of Traditional Publishing, Part 2: People don’t talk like that
A tale of hubris and envy.
“I’ve always wanted to write a book!” I hear quite a bit.
“Do it!” I say.
Writing a book has the lowest barrier to entry of any craft, hobby, art, free-time waster I can think of. Read more