"This world is a cruel place...but it's also very beautiful." – Mikasa, Attack on Titan "I ate the whole world, and I'll eat it forever." – Marina My annual write ups are my favorite posts because I get to focus on things that I love instead of the things that…
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” - Coretta Scott King I don't…
“Humanity has been stripped from the virtual world: deliberately, maliciously. The goal is to make humans less human. Less imaginative and more callous; more desperate and less kind. Less demanding of authority, but ruthlessly demanding of ordinary people who hold neither leverage nor power. Memes and mantras replace contemplation and…
"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…