A Day in the Life of a Poem (and Other Visual Narratives)

In the interest of sharing the absurdity of my life, I present to you the following images for your amusement. First is a page from my notes for my summer seminar, which I subsequently used to draft a poem: Now, I’m no poet.  Never been much for reading the stuff, let alone writing it.  I […]

My American Literature Course (Science Fiction = Well-Represented)

In case any of you were curious, the following is the final reading list for the Survey in American Literature course I begin teaching tomorrow.  I think the list is fairly diverse and incorporates a great deal of the important figures of American literature while avoiding all the stuff that would bore the hell out […]

WISB Podcast: My Grandma Will Be a Frog

One of the amusing things about my family is that it explains why I am so strange.  I seem to contain much of my strangeness on this blog, but every once in a while, it gets out… For example, I recently wrote the following to my Grandma in response to a misunderstanding she had about […]

Writing Young Adult Fantasy: The Challenge of Darkness

How dark is too dark for young adult readers?  How dark is too dark for a young adult character?  Not long ago, I responded to a Wall Street Journal post by Meghan Cox Gurdon which argued that YA fiction has become exceedingly dark.  I didn’t agree with the author’s assessment, largely because it was a “conservative” […]

Why I’m Going Indie: An Anti-Self-Publisher’s Perspective

Longtime readers of this blog will be aware of my harsh opinions about self-publishing.  The title of this post is intentionally inflammatory to highlight a point which I hope will be clear by the end of this post. I consider myself exceedingly critical of the concept of self-publishing, not because I think SPing is inherently […]

Delurking the Lurkers: Say Hello!

I recently looked at the demographics for this blog and saw that beyond my typical readership from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, there are a great deal of you arriving to this blog from a variety of other countries. Such as: Russia, Romania, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, India, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Spain, […]