Memories

One of the things I love about Old English* is how it gives you a little bit of insight into how early medieval people thought. Like, there are a lot of names for swords: Beaduscearp (“keen in battle”) and Beadulēoma (“light of battle”), among others. They named their swords the way some people name their…

This is a picture of multiple driveways at an apartment complex in LA. The driveways consist of two paved strips for each unit,  spaced the same width apart as the tires on a car.  I am trying to understand the purpose of a driveway that you have to mow. ???

Once upon a time, the word gramarye (“grammar”) meant magical lore. Over time it took on the meaning of “the set of rules that govern how a language is written and spoken,” but I love that ancient link between language and magic. From the time I was old enough to read I’ve felt the deep…

I started this morning trying to remember the phrase for “quotation marks.” I came up with “word hole.” Which, in fact, is a perfect description of how I feel about my current work-in-progress, an apparently neverending story that just isn’t quite there yet. All the words go in and nothing comes out. Well, not yet….

As the novelist Haruki Murakami says, “By viewing it through an unreal lens, the world looks more real.” One of the reasons I enjoy writing fantasy and paranormal and have basically given up writing contemporary romance is because fantastical settings allow me to explore big questions in a way that isn’t mundane or implausible. I…

People sometimes wonder how someone as feral as I am came to be a writer, which is all about connecting and communicating with other people. And the reason is, for me at least, that the connecting and communicating with others is more of a bug in the process than a feature. I mean I want…