Last night I began teaching my first creative writing class at a local college. The course helps participants launch their first novel, from the germ idea through the first chapters. While I don’t claim to be an expert in the discipline—Ernest Hemingway famously said that writing is a craft where no one ever becomes a master—I... Continue Reading →
The Literature Museum: Sci-Fi and Sexism
“Think of it as the literature museum,” my father told me when I was fifteen. I was a dually-enrolled high school student at the local college, and frustrated with some of the ideas I encountered in the curriculum’s so-called classic novels. Dad, a veteran English major himself, helped me contextualize the antiquated stories by likening... Continue Reading →
Environmental Hazards: Five Challenges of Writing Climate Fiction (Part 5)
This post is part five of a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel, Blue Karma. Challenge #4: The Headline Tango Writing Blue Karma felt like a race against time. Over the year it took me to finish it, more and more headlines about epic droughts , floods, and changing attitudes about water use peppered the... Continue Reading →
Environmental Hazards: Five Challenges of Writing Climate Fiction (Part 4)
This post is part four of a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel, Blue Karma. Challenge #3: Choose-Your-Own-Apocalypse Our present environmental situation offers a smorgasbord of cataclysms for writers to employ: air pollution; mass extinctions; ultraviolet rays roasting us through holes in the ozone layer; a rise in mosquito-borne disease as regions grow... Continue Reading →