These days many fiction magazines, in addition to seeking and prioritizing submissions from people of color and LGBTQI?+ writers, are also seeking “neurodivergent” voices. That’s me. Should I be optimistic? First a little clarity, if “neurodivergent” is unfamiliar to you, or you haven’t thought about what it means. The term covers attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) …
I’d like to promote the novel of friend and fellow author and activist Luke Hauser, A Fool Such As I: A Tarot Mystery. Here’s my Amazon review: From the blurb, I expected something fun, but a little more dramatic. Instead, I get a relentless stream of one liners, reminiscent of Douglas Adam’s. Also some self-effacing …
I got a short story published. This one after I sent it to like 20 magazines over a decade. The title is because I kept a dream journal for 10 years, and I strung a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy themed dreams together to make this, perhaps my weirdest fiction. I like the art they …
bell hooks passed on today. I was always impressed by how she presented great insight with decency and common sense. Coinkidinkally, I quoted her at length in my article in the current issue of Slingshot:
“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” Stephen King I normally don’t post about writing craft, being mostly unpublished myself. However, for critique groups, I often share craft articles I have bookmarked for various aspects of craft, and I haven’t found any about adverbs …
Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspriacy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse PM Press I mostly keep this blog and website focused on me speculative fiction. However, I wouldn’t expect to find Occult Features of Anarchism sold at Fogcon, my local progressive genre fiction convention, so maybe …
My long-lost critique partner Liz Colter has published her novel from those dreamy days, and her final project is worth reading. “A sweeping story of love and war, prejudice and acceptance”: The Halfblood War lives up to its tagline. The Halfblood War rotates between many points of view: Tirren the crown prince of Thiery, Chayan …
Last post I spoke of concision: that simpler and direct language resonates better with our hunter-gatherer selves, descibed by neo-primitivists like David Abrams. It also emerged with the back-to-original-nature philosophy of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, influenced by Taoism. Thus concision is great in fiction: writing that connects to our natural selves is entertaining. The dynamics of …
If my title irritates you, it should. We got Zen breakfast cereal, and Zen memes of someone in a leotard on a mountaintop. No mention of how that fresh feeling comes from rigorous if not painful continuous attention to reality. This post is about actual Zen and how it relates to concise writing, based on …
After my second year Fogcon has become my favorite conference. Modeled after the elder Wiscon, it’s a feminist sci-fi/fantasy/horror con. Like Wiscon, it’s not only feminist but commits to overall representation: gender, race, disability, sexuality, neuro-divergence. However, having also enjoyed Wiscon, something I like about Fogcon is it’s focus on reading and writing, where Wiscon …