Dragonfly was conceived and written on two continents, on opposite sides of the world. Come along with me on the official fan tour of historic locations relating to the book! What you’re looking at here is one of two “Birthplaces of Dragonfly.” This … Continue reading
When C. S. Lewis was beginning to make the transition from unbelief to belief in Christianity, reportedly one of the primary avenues for him was the mythological connection. Lewis found Biblical stories irritating in what they asked listeners to accept … Continue reading
How does it work for you as a writer? Do you tend to know the title of the piece you’re writing from square one, or from early on? Or are you more like me, still struggling with the title long … Continue reading
What’s that I just handed you? It’s a virtual cigar! (Well, my avatar just handed it to your avatar. Trust me. I saw them talking under the virtual streetlamp up the block.) Why am I handing out virtual cigars? Why, … Continue reading
When you live without a car as I do here in Japan, you pay a lot of attention to the weather. What the weather is doing makes about a forty-minute difference in what time I leave my apartment to get … Continue reading
Today my editor and I were swapping our Madeleine L’Engle stories, and it occurs to me this is something worth blogging about. I met Madeleine on three different occasions. The first two were at the Blooming Grove Writers’ Conferences in … Continue reading
Supposedly there’s an old saying that the bumblebee, an aerodynamic impossibility, doesn’t know it can’t fly, so it goes ahead and flies. (Which is not unlike the physics of Saturday morning cartoons, in which as long as you don’t know … Continue reading
Because of my book Dragonfly–okay, and because of stories such as “The Bone Man”–I’m sometimes considered a horror writer. As such, the editors of Erebos: Journal of the New Darkness asked me, not long ago, to write a piece for … Continue reading
Writers tend to love their tools. As a kid, I wrote with a certain type of very soft-leaded mechanical pencil. When my pages were stacked together, the graphite on them would smear, so that in time, the words became almost … Continue reading
“There is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy.” –Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist I’m about a third of the way into the extraordinary book quoted above. It was recommended to me by … Continue reading