So my daughter is home for the summer, bringing joy and great conversations and taking over my kitchen. I really enjoy both my daughters, but Younger Girl is such an emphatic presence in the house that you really know she’s here. And we talk. Oh my God do we talk. And there are some tics in her language that drive me a little crazy. Such as? “I’m really excited for this vegan dinner.” The way I understand my language, the sentence above suggests that my kid is excited on behalf of the vegan dinner, which… Read more Confessions of an Inadvertent Prescriptionist →
I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene in Sense and Sensibility that turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the original Austen is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and funny. So far I have… Read more In Praise of Fanny Price →
I ought to have mentioned this earlier, but: about a year ago I was approached (doesn’t that sound mysterious?) about becoming part of the writing team for a serialized historical story… Read more Whitehall →
Last time I was here, I talked about my earliest memory. I have long considered (because I’m a writer and my brain works that way) that it has some metaphorical… Read more I Remember It as Clear as Day →
Hand washing. I’ll come back to it. I have this theory. Or maybe it’s just an idea. It’s about the advantages you give your characters. And how many advantages you… Read more A Rule of One →
I saw Interstellar last week, a hugely ambitious, very heady film about…oh, kind of everything. The future of the human race. Striving. Time. Love. Space. Loneliness. Duplicity. Ecology. Parenthood. It’s beautiful to look at (well, Christopher Nolan) and well acted, and curiously soggy in places when Nolan attempts to be genuinely affecting. And the dialogue is mixed so low in places that I swear I missed some important plot points (when you’re married to a sound engineer you learn to notice these things). Overall I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it… Read more Fight Scenes: Time Dilation →
Hoppery is perhaps a word that would not be legal in Scrabble (although the NY Times crossword puzzle might permit it). Through the kind offices of the talented and astonishingly busy Jennifer Stevenson, writer, roller-derbyist, fellow Book View Café member (and a powerhouse, I might add), I’m part of this blog hop. (I love living in the Future: I can be on tour and still be sitting cross-legged on my couch in my bathrobe.) If you’re here, you’re quite likely from Jen’s blog, or from Katherine Eliska Kimbriel’s before that, or Laura… Read more Blog-Hoppery →
There are two kinds of people in the world: the people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and the people who don’t. (**Rimshot**) Among the many binary categorizations of humans, one that I run into a lot is: people who want to figure out why a story works, and people who don’t. And these two kinds of people can really get up each other’s nose. From my perspective, there I am, having a swell discussion about why the film we just saw worked (or didn’t), when someone… Read more Why Can’t You Just Watch the Movie? →
Madeleine Robins 