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My Brilliant Friends
I am incredibly lucky to count among my friends a bunch of brilliant and talented writers. Here’s some work that people I love have been publishing lately: Ben Mauk has just published a wonderful essay...
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I’m a Funny Woman!
My humor piece “How to Almost Probably Not Die of Rabies” is in the Funny Women column at The Rumpus!
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Links: Sickness, Sports, Oprah
A really good interview with the folks at Duotrope about their switch to a paid subscription model. Amy Butcher has a wonderful essay, “Sick,” at The Rumpus. Daniel Castro was the winner of the 2012...
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Links: Sickness, Short Stories, Schwartz
The New York Times thinks that short story collections are experiencing a renaissance. Salon (rightly) calls bullshit on that idea. The essay as reality television. There’s a really great profile of...
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Links: Heart of Glass, Serious Erotica, Sex & The Literary Writer
A new Heart of Glass is up at Fleshbot. This week’s topic: opening up lines of communication about desire. Link NSFW, of course. Amanda Hess talks Fifty Shades of Grey, Fleshbot Fiction, and the future...
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INCH & Wigleaf
I have three pieces of microfiction in two different publications this month: “Ys” and “Vacation” at Wigleaf (alongside a “postcard”) and “Dating Men with Biblical Names” in the most recent INCH. You...
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Links: New York, On Being Trapped, No Amusement
A new (again, NSFW) mini-fiction from the world of Five Stages of Grief is up at Fleshbot: “New York.” An old professor of mine has a beautiful essay up at The Millions about being a writer in the...
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Links: The Game of Death, Missouri Review Audio Competition, Annotation
Friend and all-around amazing writer/thinker/critic Tony Tulathimutte has an incredible essay up at The American Reader: “THE CURSES, THE FATES, THE RACES, THE FAKES, THE FACES, THE NAMES OF ‘THE GAME...
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Links: Zyzzyva, The State of the Short Story, What Haunts Us
An excerpt from Rebecca Rukeyser’s incredible story “The Chinese Barracks” is up at Zyzzyva. A gorgeous essay from Peter Orner about writing what haunts us. An old, but smart, piece from The Paris...
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Links: Good Vs. Talented Writing, Women & Science Fiction
Samuel R. Delany on good writing vs. talented writing. Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind —...
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Required Nonfiction Reading for Writers
Writing can be exciting. Writing can also be terrifying, thankless, exhausting, repetitive, stressful, and despair-inducing. There’s no benefit to glamorizing the poor, downtrodden artist; artists are...
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Why Alice Munro Should Play ‘Gone Home’: The Video Game as Story and Experience
I’m not exactly what you’d call a “pro gamer.” I love video games, but I mostly play ones that are recommended to me, and I’m usually a few months or even years behind the release curve. I also don’t...
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Recent News & Work
I recently ran across an incredibly kind review of my novella “Especially Heinous” at Loads of Learned Lumber. I don’t know the identity of the blogger, but thank you to her/him, nonetheless....
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Links: Fanfiction, Teaching, Ticking Off Writers, Plot
On teaching creative writing. How to tick off a writer. Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase. The discomfort seems to be not that the shows are being reinterpreted by fans, but that...
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The New Yorker & Strange Horizons
I’m slightly behind on this update, because the post was published while I was out of town and last week was full of intense class-prep, but: my essay “Salad Days at Chuck E. Cheese,” about the birth...
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Mystery & Horror Writing, Week Two
I don’t know if class is going to be held tonight (all of this horrible frozen water falling out the sky!), but here is week two of Mystery & Horror Writing. Today’s discussion is about monsters –...
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Mystery & Horror Writing, Week Three
My class schedule got all messed up because of last week’s snow, but we’ll be getting back on track this week with a discussion of monsters and body horror. Today’s readings up for discussion: Junji...
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Mystery & Horror Writing, Week Four
Today we are discussing murder. Murder as horror, murder as mystery, murder as both. This being the first class that has a mystery focus, we’ll also be discussing distribution of information/clues....
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Links: Reviews and Essays
First, two kind and lovely reviews of my stories: Rachel Swirsky on “Inventory,” and Eliza Victoria on “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU.” Next, two essays by a former Iowa...
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Mystery & Horror Writing, Weeks Six & Seven
My blog posts are a bit behind because of last week’s snow; today we’re doing three workshops and all of the readings from “Haunted Houses” and “Myth and Legend.” We’ll be discussing last week’s...
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