Memories of my early writing days are patchy, but I still remember bits and pieces—and one thing I remember, quite fondly, is how I used to think I had to describe everything. Imagine this: you are thirteen. You are a…
I’ve been reading (well, listening to) Ready Player One this week, and it’s made me think about settings. Okay—lots of things make me think about settings, but the book is what inspired the blog post. Ready Player One takes place in our…
For a while now I’ve been promising the amazing Ingrid that I’d write “that post” about the Hunger Games. You know—the one that compares the books to the movies and finds the movies wanting. Until Mockingjay Pt 2 came out,…
This post was going to be titled “reading as a child”, but I was twelve once, and while I might look back now and label who I was then a child, I wouldn’t have done so at the time. Furthermore, I volunteered with middle…
In November of 2014, I moved further north than I’d ever lived before—to Dundee, on the east coast (ish) of Scotland. There were a lot of warnings about the weather, and how oppressive it could be in winter, but my husband…
Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff tells the story of a book critic whose childhood love of language has been spoiled by a lifetime of reading. We had to read it for senior honors English, and nothing has been…