Most Recent Open Thread
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Open Thread and Link Farm, I Always Feel Like Clown Eggs Are Watching Me edition
Cartoon: What Kind Of People Sexualize Children?
Cartoon: It's Always The Sick Person's Fault
Open Thread and Link Farm, Canned Milk Edition
Cartoon: Patriarchy is Everywhere
An Anti-Trans Argument that's Identical to an Anti-Choice Argument (and why it's wrong)
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And then there were three
7 hours ago - Fivethirtyeight
CPAC And The Broader Republican Party Agree: It’s Trump’s Party For Now.
10 hours ago - Election Law Blog
Travis Crum: “Rethinking the Race or Party Question in Brnovich”
12 hours ago - Whatever
The Big Idea: Emily R. King
14 hours ago - Pharyngula
The Matrixpunk esthetic must die
19 hours ago - We Hunted the Mammoth
Robert Futrelle, RIP
Yesterday - Crooked Timber
Twigs and branches
Yesterday - Family Inequality
The one-child policy was bad and so is “One Child Nation”
Yesterday - Dollars and Sense
For Black History Month: The Economics of the Great Migration
Yesterday - Love, Joy, Feminism
A Blogger’s Farewell
Yesterday - Language: A Feminist Guide
Toy stories
2 days ago - The Incidental Economist
Variolation, Innoculation, and Vaccination: A History, Part I
3 days ago - Dances With Fat
Dear Fat People – Don’t Feel Guilty About Getting Vaccinated
4 days ago - Mooretoons
The Stolen Child — Page 17
4 days ago - This Is So Gay
Is COVID-19 a Vegetable?
4 days ago - Scott Wood Makes Lists
All of Scott’s Online Books
2 weeks ago
- Lawyers Guns and Money
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Category Archives: Essays
Thoughts on “Compassionate Simulation”, from PH Lee
Lee and I did have a very intense process while writing this story. There were a lot of craft questions but because the subject matter of this is so intimate and intense — a child’s relationship with abusive and authoritarian … Continue reading → Continue reading
Learn the Rules Before You Break Them. Or Don’t.
I’m teaching my class on how to break the rules on Saturday, May 25th. Rules can put fiction in a box; let’s talk about ways to explode out of it. There’s an old adage: Learn the rules before you break … Continue reading → Continue reading
The Words Are Always There — Poetic Tools for Prose Writers
Poetry is focused on words. So is prose! But the way we talk about words in poetry is different from the way we talk about them in prose. Merging the perspectives of poetry and prose has benefitted me enormously as … Continue reading → Continue reading
Writing a Recalcitrant Character
(This essay was posted 7 days early on my Patreon. Thank you to all my patrons!) I wrote this on a writers forum, about my current progress in writing my Tor.com novella, “Woman in the Tower Window.” It’s an interesting … Continue reading → Continue reading
Patreon content for January 2018
Patreon content for January has just been posted! $1 and above patrons can read a piece from my recent found poetry kick based on google searches for emotions–in this case, “anxiety.” $2 and above patrons get to see a sneak … Continue reading → Continue reading
Open-Hearted Generosity at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference
Last weekend, I went to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was honored to be there as a presenter, and I taught workshops on Breaking the Rules and Detail & Image. I also had two blue-pencil … Continue reading → Continue reading
How do you handle writer’s block?
There are a few different kinds of writer’s block. One kind is medical. If one of my chronic illnesses is flaring up, I may not be able to write. It’s hard to write through a migraine, for instance. It’s also … Continue reading → Continue reading
In Defense of “Slice of Life” Stories
When I was in college, I insisted that any poem worth its words would have a strong idea behind it–something it wanted to communicate to the reader. I still think that, but I’ve broadened my definition of what an idea … Continue reading → Continue reading
On Writing and Mortality
This essay originally appeared on the blog Big Other and was later reprinted on the SFWA website. I’ve rewritten it to make its points more sharply and eliminate repetition. The original version is still available on the other sites. It was originally … Continue reading → Continue reading