Happy Halloween, Squiders! If we look at the entire Harry Potter series as a whole, where Order of the Phoenix is the Dark Moment and Deathly Hallows is the climax, then Half-Blood Prince is the lead-up.  Sure, it has some Dark Moment tints to it, as Harry loses the last adult he ever really looked [...]

Up in the sky!  It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…well, it’s a Sky Shark, but we will ignore it for the time being and pretend it’s Superman to go along with today’s entry. Superhero fiction is somewhat unique among speculative fiction subgenres in that it exists almost exclusively in visual formats.  Comic books, movies, [...]

Writing, as so many books and other sources like to tell us, is a solitary activity.  We think of the “great” writers, holed up in their studies, never seen for days at a time, chain-smoking and drinking their absinthe and tossing wads of crumpled-up pieces of paper onto the floor in an ever-growing pile. Maybe [...]

I’ve been taking an editing class, not necessarily because I feel like I don’t know how to edit, but that I am ridiculously inefficient at it and can probably use all the help I can get. This class’s point is to, eventually, get it so you can identify all major issues in a single pass [...]

Once upon a time, there was a writer who wrote a writing/reading/scifi/fantasy blog, and she and her pet Landsquid and the Landsquid’s nemesis the Alpaca all decided to go to a coffee shop to get some peppermint mochas.  All seemed to be going according to plan until the Alpaca attempted to eat the pastry display [...]