I have no words to express my sorrow for the loss of 26 lives in Newtown, CT. Those poor children and their brave teachers deserve more than my fitful attempts at meaning or outrage. So instead, because food is love and love is comfort, I leave you with the words of Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker. It is not often that a cookbook makes me cry; in this case, it’s only this cookbook Read more…
So much of writing is a wordage game that it always kills me to cut in the first draft. Dammit, Jim! I’m a writer, not a … word-destroyer person… Anyway, so that hurt, but what ended up happening is that though I cut out an 11000-word sequence, I had always been dubious about it, and as soon as it was pasted into the cut file (always always always keep a cut file) it was like Read more…
When a person rereads Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky as an adult in the 21st century, a couple of things stand out. First, there’s the Old Man motif — the wise old mentor who plays as stand-in for Heinlein himself. It’s done well or badly in all of Heinlein’s books (excruciatingly so in Stranger in a Strange Land). In Tunnel, it’s perfectly fine. Secondly, I kinda wish that YA could still be like this. Maybe Read more…