Apr 29
Lest the last post be too disparaging about fairy tale ladies in iffy marriage situations, let me bring a seriously rad lady to your attention: SHAHRAZAD, heroine of The Arabian Nights So here’s the deal with The Arabian Nights: it’s one large frame story with several smaller frame stories grouped inside of it. Tales within tales within …
Apr 16
So, Disney Princess movies. I know you have a range of feelings and thoughts conjured by the term. In our culture, whether it’s nostalgia, irritation, boredom, hatred, glee, adoration, or nausea, Disney Princess movies probably mean something to you. And I’ve got to take down everyone’s favorite darling today, my friends. The one that people …
Mar 18
Let me tell you about them. Because, thing is, they are where all the bad-ass women of fairy tales have been hiding all this time. First, the basics: Compiled by Francis James Child in the mid to late 1800s, the full title is actually The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and it is a collection of …
Jan 26
After exhaustive research, I have come to the following conclusion: swans are creep-ass. I think swans are physically weird. This is a totally personal bias based on me being terrified of geese as a small child. My preschool had a farm right next to it, and geese (and once, a cow) would sometimes escape into …
Jan 17
Let me tell you about a project I once did. I funded it with grant money, which means it must be good, right? The original concept was grand and sweeping: A three-part graphic novel script based on Dante’s Divine Comedy (in my head I imagined all of the issues, bound together as one large and …
Sep 25
Note: Revising poems is hard. Never again will I make Spideman Comic strip style promises at the end of blog posts. I think it’s about time you met the main characters of my book. Some of you know them in passing, but I’d like to properly introduce you. PENNY is a delightfully awkward girl. She’s …
Jun 28
I thought it was bad when my Dad turned into an abusive monster, my parents split, and my Mum dragged us back to America. I thought it was bad living in the most shite town ever, Colorado Springs. Hell, I thought it was bad when my sister Cassie disappeared off the face of the earth …
Jun 21
When I went to undergrad at Colorado College, I was a writing tutor. I remember one day a girl came in with a literary theory paper about The Cat in the Hat. Her assignment was to pick a critical point of view and analyze The Cat in the Hat from said point of view. She’d …
Apr 05
So, I suppose it’s time I talked about Novel No. 2. It’s tentatively titled Changeling, because I love me some single-word titles. Currently, it consists of a few more than 50,000 words of text (thanks, NaNoWriMo), a couple of outlines, and a bunch of research into the wacky, wacky world of British folklore. Specifically, I’ve …