"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence…
As unfun as real piracy is, especially for struggling authors, I do enjoy our town's annual pirate festival in the summer and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies. My family concluded our summer movie nights with one of my favorite movies, Stardust, which features lightning pirates - a…
This past month has been like a "Greatest Hits" of bad takes and worse behavior in the online world of reading and writing. A common theme is people misappropriating and weaponizing the language of legitimate issues to justify misbehavior, which is not only tacky and obnoxious, it minimizes those issues…
It's been a weird month, both in the world of indie publishing and in the world at large - but I'm going to be focusing on the US for the purposes of this post because I'll be covering a lot of seemingly unrelated ground before it all comes together. A…
A creative mind must be balanced by a disciplined body. Splinter Over five years ago, my sons enrolled in kenpo karate. Even though I've wanted to learn a martial art ever since the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie, an interest reinforced by Sonya Blade and later Buffy, it never…
“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett Girls hear early and often the dangers of leaving home alone.…
If your adolescence was anything like mine, Saturdays were all about the orange couch. I'm talking SNICK - Nickelodeon's primetime line-up geared at then-preteens (now tweens) and teens. It opened with Clarissa Explains It All. She was funny and dressed in crazy outfits like Stacy and Claudia in The Babysitter's…
Last month, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl - as preordained by Soros, according to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists anyway. And for all the complaints about excessive NFL coverage of Taylor Swift, her critics made sure she remained in headlines by accusing her of Satanism. And here I thought…
This is another one of those ridiculous pop culture controversies (see last year's faux-outrage over Barbie) that I feel almost embarrassed to discuss, but choose to because it still fits into a larger narrative. If you somehow missed it, comedian Jo Koy was asked to host the Golden Globes on…
If you've seen my annual wrap ups before, you know I'm often playing catch up. Case in point, Nope (2022), Jordan Peele's brilliant homage to blockbuster creature features that holds up a mirror to society - it's no coincidence a character dubs aliens 'Viewers'. Nope has more in common with…