My essay, “Had motherhood ruined my favorite childhood stories?” is featured in Modern Parent this week. As I snuggled in with my husband and my then-first-grader to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I looked forward to sharing my childhood memories of Rankin and Bass’ claymation classic. Within five minutes of pressing play, though, all I could think […]
Had motherhood ruined my favorite childhood stories? Read More »
I have a fondness for seeing worlds torn apart. Fictional worlds, that is. I’m not talking about post-apocalyptic fiction, though I enjoy the genre and have even written in it. I’m talking in the broader sense, when a fictional world is built on assumptions that the reader or viewer comes to accept, and then those
The Rise of Skywalker: New hopes, old choices, and spoilers Read More »
An article on how Twilight-hate is part of the larger picture of teen girl hate in our society, something I’ve been aware of for a while now: “For many people, the fact that teenage girls like something — whether that something is Taylor Swift or One Direction or ‘Twilight’ — is a reason to write
Is Star Wars better than Twilight? Read More »
I came upon this embedded into a five-year-old blog post of mine. Some things one doesn’t stop needing to hear: If you want to cry as well as smile, this longer version ends with a Jim Henson tribute. How many years has it been? (25, says Wikipedia.) I still miss his work and his presence
Today’s dose of good feeling and general inspiration Read More »
So. There’s a trailer online for The Force Awakens, aka Star Wars episode VII. And I have thoughts. (ETA: Here’s the first full trailer. The thoughts below are–more or less–nchanged by its release.) Those thoughts begin in the summer of 1999, on the release date for The Phantom Menance, I was hiking through Capitol Reef
Star Wars, episode … yeah Read More »
Chelsea Mead Kirkpatrick’s film adaptation of my short story “Drawing the Moon” begins shooting in just a few weeks! “Drawing the Moon” first appeared in Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares and is the story of a boy who’s convinced the moon has stolen his dead parents away–and who will do anything to get them back.
“Andrew knew that the moon had stolen his parents away …” Read More »
I still need to make it out to see Catching Fire (I have, of course, long since read it), but I sound this article on Peeta playing the functional role of movie girlfriend kind of interesting. What makes me sad is that Hollywood has such generally rigidly defined gender roles that this makes sense, as
Peeta as movie girlfriend (and story relationships in general) Read More »
… through a pop-culture dystopic lens. First, from the Catching Fire soundtrack, an industrial cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Followed by Cookieness Evereat and Pita in the epic Catching Fur:
My childhood revisioned … Read More »
So among other things (like catching up on laundry and email and getting outside more), finishing a book tends to mean taking in some mindless movies. I don’t watch movies much in general, but there’s a certain pleasure, in a certain mood, in hitting a second-run theater alone and kicking back with low expectations and
On not-horrible movies and the nature of dreams Read More »
You know the awful “it’s all just fine” ending to the movie of The Golden Compass? The one that anyone who’s read the book all the way to the end knows is a lie, because the real ending is one where nothing is at all fine? The real ending was actually filmed. And there’s a
Department of how did I not know about this? Read More »