invitation to discussons
At the age of 10, I lived in Madrid. The first thing I remember about the event was watching my mother carry a basin-full of blood out of our housekeeper’s room. There was so much blood, and it scared me. The Spanish doctor came, and I heard he and my mother shouting at each...
Deeper »
I was 22 years old when I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.‘ I remember being angry for days after I read it. My father, who read it at the same time, laughed at me and told me to be a more critical reader. He said it was a novel that typified feminist hysteria....
Deeper »
One of the things that I think very few of my readers know about me is that I am bipolar. I’ve hesitated to say anything about it because I’ve always feared that if people knew, they would simply discount anything I had to say. So, why have I decided to be public about it?...
Deeper »
I decided to read Bared To You because it was sold as a well-written version of Fifty Shades of Grey. And I thought: hey, maybe the optimists were right! Maybe FSOG was a flawed but timely incursion of erotic fiction into mainstream literature. To give credit where credit is due, Sylvia Day is not...
Deeper »
A number of people have remarked on the fact that, although I write stories set in a lot of different places, there are more stories set in Japan or containing Japanese themes than on any other single culture. There are certainly a lot of stories set in Spain, where I grew up, and in...
Deeper »
Montague Rhodes James (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936), was a Medieval Scholar and provost at Cambridge. In his spare time, he wrote ghost stories. Although his prose wasn’t terribly poetic, I always thought his sense of place and character was. He was also just a wonderful structural story plotter. All his ghost stories...
Deeper »
I never really thought I needed to take a clear stance on this on my blog because I assumed that anyone reading my stories would intuitively know where I stood on the subject. It seems I was wrong. I received an email asking me to clearly state my position, so here it is: If...
Deeper »
Some time ago, Laura Miller of Salon.com wrote a compelling critique of the Twilight series. She had a particularly insightful comment to make of Bella: Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she’s more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible...
Deeper »
Is it something in the water, or a secret corrosive side-effect of too much reality TV? No compulsory logic classes in first year university anymore? During the whole censorship / PayPal debate, over and over again, I read people equate and confuse real examples of illegal sexual behavior with fiction. Hyperbolic comments like “Well,...
Deeper »
There is a hauntingly good post at the New Yorker this week. John Cassidy asks the question “Why Republican Women Vote for Santorum” and offers up an amazingly insightful and frightening response from one of his commenters: About women supporting Santorum: I too find this baffling, and can only attribute it to some form...
Deeper »
