Storytellersunplugged

My mother liked to get things done and hated to impose on anyone. This may be why she never made it to the maternity ward and birthed me in the lobby of a hospital. It was the first of many surprise entrances through the wrong door at the wrong time of life that have dogged me ever since. Now you might think that bad timing would be fatal to a writer or to anyone reaching for high stakes against long odds, and ... Read More

--Justine Musk So here’s the thing. I sat down yesterday to write my essay for this site. I had a topic. I had a sense of where the piece would start, where it would end up, and how it might go in-between. But when it came game-time, I realized: I got nuthin’. Could be I’m a bit burned-out – and maybe I could have essayed about that, except Elizabeth Bear already said everything I would want to say about that point in your ... Read More

Bev Vincent  Get the podcast - or Subscrbe in iTunes When I was a kid, the National Film Board of Canada ran short documentary vignettes between TV shows. One that I remember vividly was about Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the New World. The film was stop-motion with ships rocking up and down on conspicuously fake waves. The line that stands out in my mind explained how long the journey lasted and how some people were getting impatient. “The days passed. The nights passed. ... Read More

Stop me before I kill again. I’m going to do it, yes, I am, I’m really going to do it. Going to write about another obscure topic so ephemeral that I don’t know if I can pull it off. You may have noticed that I shy away from the easy stuff – practical stuff with practical answers. Not that those things aren’t invaluable – they are – but all the sane and successful writers in this blog do an admirable ... Read More

My first word was “Boo!” and I’ve loved surprises ever since.  I want to discover things.  Refine that, I want to discover hidden things, things that have meaning.  I want there to be more than five senses can take in.  Five senses are standard issue.  Most critters with fin, skin, fur or feathers have them, often with a superior specialty.  Jack rabbits out-hear me.  Eagles out-see me.  I’m tied with the koala bear.  But word has it that heart, mind and soul ... Read More

Have you ever noticed that the outcomes to life’s most successful quests can’t really be foreseen in detail?  If it’s an initiative that your heart is truly into, then whatever concept you have of success ahead of time, the outcome ends up exceeding it.  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  But starting out all you can see are the complexities and the problems up front.  The solutions build stroke by stroke like a painting taking on shape and color.  In the ... Read More

There are people who can’t help but be different, and people who choose to be different, and people who live in fear of being different. If you’re a writer, that third category is a killer. In fact, it’s a killer for just about anything that isn’t sedentary, unimaginative or uninspiring. I’m writing about ways of thinking, of course, and let me just call that fear category S3S for Stage 3 Suffocation. Excitement and discovery don’t happen much by ... Read More

(so what the hell do I do now?) Justine Musk 1 Perhaps theme gets a bad rap. Its twin, Theme with a capital T, deserves all the potshots and ridicule and dressing-down that it gets. But if Theme is the pretentious dude decked out in Gucci and Prada who wears sunglasses at night and brags about how many thousands of dollars he dropped at his VIP table at Hyde or Les Deux the other night -- which was a worknight because only wage slave losers ... Read More

by George Guthridge We just learned that our son, who turned 13 on the last day of the year (and, ohmigod, in now officially a teenager), has Attention Deficit Disorder. That makes studying difficult for a kid who already is adverse to it, and makes it doubly hard for him to catch up – he has spoken English only for three years, so he is behind his classmates. But what does that have to do with fiction writing? Several years ago it occurred ... Read More

by Gerard Houarner By a happy coincidence, this one follows up Elizabeth's great essay from a few days ago, though takes a different track (which is scary, because you never really want to wander too far off a trail blazed by Ms Massie, but I'm brave, or perhaps a little too much like those unsung stars of COPS, with their inspirational bad choices.....).   I was reading Entertainment Weekly for January 15th (yes, I read EW, mostly because it's the ... Read More