A friend is looking for a short story that fits the following parameters: "It's about an autistic girl who is with her mother at a convention, I think, and gets whisked away to Faerie by some kind of imp who implies everything will suit her, and in the end the girl comes back to her mother ( Read more... )

So I just finished reading a Peter Dickinson novel that had psychics in it. And it reminded me once again: where did all the science fiction novels with psychics go? I’m not sure I miss them. There are still some places you can find things like telekinetics-mostly superpower-tinged stories like Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith’s Stranger. ( Read more... )

My dear friend Michael Merriam asked me to take part in a Writing Process Blog Tour. He answered these questions about process last week, and next week some more of my friends will answer them.

1) What am I working on?

When I told Michael about a week, week and a half, ago that I’d answer these questions, I thought, boy, that’ll be an interesting ( Read more... )

Okay, another dialect question. Haven’t done one in awhile. Does your home dialect contain the phrase “a goin’ concern,” usually applied to small children? And if not, would you still have some sense of what “that child is a goin’ concern” might mean if someone else used it, or would you be completely in the dark?

(Sometimes when I’m talking to ( Read more... )

I have a friend who has developed an academic interest in what she terms neo-Victorian kids’ lit (/MG) and YA. I have asked, and she does not draw a firm line between that and steampunk. Recommendations, anti-recommendations, interesting works to discuss: go.

I’ll start: Chris Moriarty’s The Inquisitor’s Apprentice fills my heart with joy, and I ( Read more... )

Poll managing favorites

(I have just this week completely worn out not one but two favorite garments--to the point where there is no point to donating them to any charity, as they would do no one more good than they have already done me--so I am thinking about these things at the moment.)

I know some of you read Joan Aiken. If I was to read something of hers that was not a Wolves book, not about a pet raven, and not a Jane Austen homage/continuation, what would I start with? (To be clear, I have liked the Wolves books and had no particular objection to Arabella or her raven. But then I'm left with this sort of largeish mass of ( Read more... )

I just read the comments section of a blog post in which a couple of people were so relentlessly negative about themselves that it made me want to curl into a ball and whimper on their behalf. So! I have declared it Relentless Positivity Day in Mrissaland. Three questions ( Read more... )

sksperry tagged me in his Next Big Thing post...just as I was putting aside a major project in hopes that I would be better able to work on it later. But all is not lost, because thanks to a prompt from pameladean my brain started working in the correct world for what was my planned next-next novel project, so I'm working on that now, and it's actually going really ( Read more... )

So here we are at my favorite restaurant. Yes! It's the Restaurant of Lost Menu Items. All the things from restaurants that have disappeared, or menu items that have fallen off the menus of restaurants that are still around, and try though you might you just can't get them the way they used to do them. No benefactor could get you there by plane ( Read more... )