Thoughts on Fear and Hatred
From kindergarten to senior year, I attended a school that charged a fortune in tuition to the wealthiest students specifically so that it could offer scholarships—either partial or full—to the rest. It was vital to them that we did not grow up insulated by...
So Cold the River, a TBR Challenge Post
Well, I completely flunked on this month's theme. I did read a Phyllis A Whitney from long ago, but it was a re-read, so I can't count it as part of my TBR elimination. Instead, I went for the boook I think has been hanging around my TBR longest. I had Koryta's book...
Character Creation: Mayonnaise, Psychology, and Culture
Approximately one hundred years ago, when I took an intro to psychology class in college, my professor said he was going to do an experiment to show us why, if we went into psychology as a profession, we needed to know about a client's history. The client, he told us,...
Square Peg, Round Hole: The Constriction of Genre
This past week was the RWA national conference in San Diego. I've gone to national for mmmmppph years and I've always had a good time. Some years are more useful than others, but I have a lot of friends in the organization so it's always fun. But conferences are for...
The Brain Game
Here we are again. Those of you who've known me a long time will know this is not the first — or worst — time that my epilepsy medications have stopped working. But every time it happens it's a gigantic pain. Someone asked me the other day how I know when they're not...
The Settings Thesaurus Set…The Thesauri You Didn’t Know You Needed
(A cross-post from Angela Ackerman. I have the Emotion Thesaurus and plan to get the settings books as well, so I've given her the floor to discuss the settings thesauri on this, the week of their release.) It is a writer's job to draw readers into the fictional story...
Worth Every Penny
So I am switching it up a little this month. Instead of doing a single book review for the TBR Challenge, I am going to talk about a bunch of books, all with (at least relatively) happy endings, that cost more than you might usually spend on a book but are worth every...
On Alcohol and Crime
I have some thoughts. They won’t be particularly fun, so feel free to move along. I won’t blame you. Many of you know that I rarely drink, and never in large groups. I’ve been a non-drinker for more than thirty years, so I hardly think about it any more. I spend a...
Julia, a TBR Challenge Read
This month's challenge was to read something in your TBR pile that was "different." I chose Julia, a classic horror novel by Peter Straub that I somehow didn't read when I was in my horror phase in the 1980s. Published in 1975, it was made into at least one movie, The...
Named of the Dragon, a TBR Challenge Read
Now, really, there's no point in writing a review of this book. Miss Bates's review moved it to the top of my TBR, and you should all immediately go read her review and imagine me saying "ditto." The charm of spending the Christmas holidays in South Wales, with its...