In the early 90s I started writing the book that became The Stone War. It’s–for lack of a better term–a home-town apocalypse book about a disaster, or rather disasters, befalling New York City. The Stone War was published in 1999; after 9/11, a number of people (none of them New Yorkers) said brightly, “Oh, it’s just like your book!” No, it was not; the only similarity was in scenes, early on, of people walking away from the site of the disaster. Like you might, if something frightening and huge happened.… Read more Working Together →
There ain’t, I am reliably informed, no accounting for taste. But from time to time I come across something that I have heard lauded for years and years, and my… Read more One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor →
I have on occasion contributed a series to this blog called “Raised in a Barn.” It is a loose series of anecdotes about my, um, colorful childhood, spent between Greenwich… Read more Feeling Memoirish →
This week: Cuckoo, a story about a woman who adopts a foundling who turns out to be very different from what she expects.
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Boon is my take on elves in New York. Short version: it’s not all glamor (especially if you’re a single mother or a Brownie). It’s live on Curious Fictions. Check it out!
I’m a coward. Let’s get that on the table first thing. I am not one of those heroines who stands up to a person in a rage and tells them off in some narratively satisfying way. My own personality, and early training, work against it. When I’m dealing with a volcanically angry person? I shut down. I get quiet and sort of “gone-to-my-own-private-island” absent until it’s over. It’s different if I see someone being bullied or harassed–but even then, my tendency is not to confront the bully but to take… Read more Writing Angry →
It was perhaps a mistake to re-read A Wrinkle in Timebefore I saw the movie, but I hadn’t read the book in a few decades. I enjoyed it, picked up… Read more I Want(ed) to Believe →
When I consider it, and I have been considering it lately, all the books I’ve written that I thought worked had a gap in the writing process, somewhere a little… Read more Mind the Gap →
Madeleine Robins 