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She Who Controls the Spice Controls the Universe
AS MANY OF YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW, Dune by Frank Herbert (and the three sequels) is one of my favorite books of all time. It has a lot of stuff going on that’s worth loving (and a few problematic things but that’s for another conversation), but one of the main things that drew me to it was…
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The Language of Dreams
Since I’m being my authentic runcible witchy self on here, I wanted to talk about something that has been on my mind a lot the past few weeks: dreams. Years ago I saw a popular blogger at a literary agency post an article about dream sequences in fiction. Her #hottake was that if your novel…
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Rise of the Runcible Witch
As some of you may know, my parents met in a religious cult. I won’t get into which one, but they were out of it by the time I was in kindergarten. Did it influence me and my brothers? Of course. But it was less of an influence from the cult itself, and more of an…
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The Pie of Life
So, I graduated on July 18th, and immediately followed up with two weeks of non-stop family visiting from out of state/country. Once things were finally back to “normal,” I realized I have no idea what my new “normal” looks like. I’ve made a pact with my classmates to finish a solid first draft of my thesis…
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New Site, New First Post
(If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed some big changes to the site. What can I say? It’s time for a fresh start.) I had intended, way back in January, to start updating my blog regularly. I had intended to do a lot of things in 2018, but, as usual, Life (and more…
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Burning Bright in a Garbage Fire World
I recently attended and returned from my second residency at VCFA (and my first winter residency). It was in many ways even better than the first residency, and in some ways it was less, but it was incredible to be surrounded by so many creative, insightful, inspiring people, especially after the year we’ve all had.…
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Thoughts from the Inside of an Egg
(Yeah yeah I haven’t updated in ages. 2016 sucked, end of story.) Of all the slang to come about in the last decade, “no chill” has bee the best phrase to apply to my general state of existence. I’ve always been an excitable, overly anxious person, over-thinking, over-processing, to the point of wild emotional instability.…
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VCFA: No Voldemort Here
I’m trying to wrap my brain around the residency before it all fades away, but frankly I’m still exhausted from the whole experience (plus a mostly unrelated health issue on my first day back to work :P) so I’d better write down what I remember, now, before it’s gone. VCFA is magical. They call it…
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The Timing of Things
Hello all! It’s been a while! Life has been life, shall we say? And let it go at that. But some exciting things have happened while I’ve been absent from this blog! I finally decided to take the plunge and apply for a few low-residence MFA programs in creative writing, specifically programs geared towards writing…
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I’m floating in a most peculiar way.
(This is not a memorial post or an obituary. There are hundreds, thousands of those published by now. This is a personal reflection on what David Bowie meant to me, individually. Your mileage may have varied.) It took me a while to get my thoughts around David Bowie’s passing. See, he was an unusual important…
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Happy New Year
It’s still the beginning of the academic year for lots of people. It’s the beginning of Persephone’s descent into the Underworld. It is the end of the Days of Awe–the stretch of days between Rosh Hashannah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur. To me, it feels like new beginnings. Maybe it’s because these past…
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Enjoy the goddamn journey, ’cause it’s all we’ll ever have.
I have been writing literally since I have been able to construct sentences on (construction) paper (with crayons). They were the plagiaristic early fan fiction of a child who had just watched The Last Unicorn and Labyrinth about a hundred million times, but still. I was telling stories. I would say I began writing fiction in…
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2015: The Empress (Part 2)
(For Part I, click here) All my life I’ve been enchanted by the mystical, mythical world. I love, even if I do not wholeheartedly believe in, the idea of fortune-telling and psychics and second-sight. (You may have gathered that from my tarot-based book series.) I’ve even joked with my friends that I collect psychic readings,…
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2015: The Empress (Part 1)
To fully appreciate my perspective on 2015, I have to go back to New Year’s Eve, 2013: I was driving to a friend’s cottage to spend the holiday and weekend with them for a mini writing retreat. My first Christmas after separating from my husband had been hard, even though it was anything but traditional–my family…
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Growing Up.
I’m 28 years old, and by many accounts you might say I’m all grown up. I did a bunch of adult things in this past decade: got married, bought a house, got a dog, bought a car, sorted out my life. Now I’m doing this big grown up thing I never wanted to do and…
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Let’s not pretend.
I’m terrible at keeping a blog. I have no excuses, and finally I no longer feel like I need one. So let this be the last thing I say on the subject. Moving on: what’s been going on with me? I’m in a 2 personal year, which is boring. If you follow numerology at all,…
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Regeneration.
I have this scene from an old draft of a novel that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use, but it’s one of my favorite scenes ever and it speaks so deeply to me now. In the scene, the devil’s son is telling the MC about the phoenix cycle, how so many people…
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Secrets! Or: I Got Fired From My Day Job and I Liked It
I’m going to tell you a secret: I think I’m actually a fucking AMAZING writer. Did that make you feel uncomfortable? Did you just think, “wow, someone’s full of herself”? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. We’ve all been programmed to think that if a person is proud of their ability, then they don’t…
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Haunted at 17: Being Silenced
My favorite YA author [not going to fangirl, not going to fangirl] Nova Ren Suma is celebrating the release of her newest work, 17 & Gone, all week by asking fellow authors to blog about what haunted them at 17. Her first YA novel, Imaginary Girls, is to-date the greatest YA novel I have ever read,…
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Spring, Sprang, Sprung
It’s officially SPRING! No, don’t look at the snow outside. Or the thermometer. Or the clouds obscuring the precious, golden, lemony sunlight… it is officially spring! JUST GO WITH IT. Spring, like many things in our calendar and in our world, is rife with symbolism and meanings that have been liberally applied by human beings since…