Rantytime. Warning for profanity — although I’m going to try and rein it in, as best I can. Nobody listens to Angry Black Women, after all. This rant has been partially triggered by yet another discussion of “strong female characters” circulating in the blogosphere. (A good jumping-off point for this discussion is this io9 article, [...]
Category Archive for ‘Thinkythoughts’ 
Now THAT was a trip.
Back from Hawaii. Exhausted, as one is wont to be after any 12-hour flight and jetlag, but it doesn’t help that I spent the whole trip doing stuff like this: That was day 1 of the trip: a 4-mile hike around and across Kilauea Iki, which is basically the remains of a lava lake that [...]
The Inheritance Trilogy: The Roleplaying Game?
Now, don’t get all excited. Nobody’s offered or expressed any interest whatsoever in creating a game out of the Inheritance Trilogy. It’s just that a fan mentioned the idea on Twitter, and it intrigued me, so I’m bringing the question here: How would an RPG based on the Inheritance Trilogy work? For now, let’s go [...]
Dreaming Awake
Explanatory note: This is an essay I wrote for the forthcoming anthology The Miseducation of the Writer — essays by writers of color on genre literature — to be edited by Maurice Broaddus, John Edward Lawson, and Chesya Burke. I’ll keep you posted on deets as they come. Long ago, in the time before now, [...]
We Need a Hero! We Don’t Need Another Hero.
There was an interesting convo in the comments of the last post about how a writer’s background impacts writing — specifically re epic fantasy, but by extension pretty much everything. Foz Meadows summed it up best, I think: Prior to doing this, I might never have stopped to consider whether a white author’s race were [...]
If Tolkien Were…
Didn’t mention this here ’til now because I wanted to think about it a bit, though those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook probably saw it already. But anyway, last week I had an interview with columnist/critic Laura Miller from Salon, who talked with me and David Anthony Durham on the recent [...]
Must Epic Fantasy Be Set in the Past?
Happy post-Labor-Day, for you Americans out there. I spent the weekend relaxing with friends, eating peaches and drinking peach-flavored wine, and writing — blissfully writing. ::happy sigh:: It’s been awhile since I could write as much as I wanted. Felt really good. Anyway. Earlier this weekend (starting September 3), I inadvertently provoked a sprawling discussion [...]
Reading outside the lines
Just flew in from Reno, and boy are — ::slaps self:: Sorry. Punchy from the jetlag, hangover, sleeping on airplanes, and oxygen deprivation. Just got back from Worldcon, which was in the quite lovely town of Reno, Nevada. Unfortunately it was in an unlovely series of spread-out, smoke-filled, noisy-with-many-blinky-lights casino hotels, which I might’ve enjoyed [...]
Considering Colonialism
A few years back, I read a great anthology: So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Meehan. Having not really started studying historical analysis or the impact of colonialism back then, I wasn’t entirely clear on what “postcolonial” meant. “Colonial” I got, since as a longtime fan [...]
The Limitations of Womanhood in Fantasy (and everywhere else, but for now, fantasy)
One of my favorite manga is a shoujo (girls’) comedy serial called Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge (YNS), sold in the US as The Wallflower. Now, the Japanese title has a more complex meaning than a phrase like “the wallflower” can encompass, in part because it’s referencing a phrase that’s fairly esoteric to Japanese culture — the [...]
