Elizabeth Bonesteel's Blog, page 8

Christmas Memories

In my family, Christmas stockings are snuck into children’s beds on Christmas Eve, after they are asleep. The idea behind this is to prevent children from getting up at 4:00 am to demand presents; they’ll instead be distracted long enough for the adults in the household to get something resembling a decent night’s sleep.

My brother and I shared a room until I was 11. He was always a much better sleeper than I was, which I believe was self-defense: I’d want to talk to him after we were in bed....

Review: “Control” (2019)

This post contains aaaaaaaaalllll the spoilers for the 2019 Remedy Entertainment video game.

Summary: Weird, creepy, sometimes touching, occasionally hilarious linear(ish) second-person shooter. CW for lots of swearing, lots of violence (almost all gunshot), and some mental health stuff. (Anti-CW for sexual abuse; there’s no sexual violence or even harrassment here, not even in implication.)

It’s basically a plow-through-clouds-of-bad-guys shooter, so maybe you don’t care, but there’s som...

The Illusion of Genre

So to pass the time while the current administration keeps throwing spaghetti at the wall, I thought Id write a little about genre.

Genre is a marketing construct.

Is that little enough?

To be more specific: genre is a way of categorizing books that helps publishers sell them to the people they believe will want to read them. The divisions between genres are often fuzzy, and even incomprehensible to people who arent readers of those genres; but they exist, mainly, to set the expectations of...

Writing The Ending

Since 2010, I’ve believed the best thing NaNoWriMo has taught me is to push forward even when the narrative is shaky and unfinished.

This year, I realized the best thing it’s taught me is to write the ending.

10 years ago I signed up for my first NaNoWriMo, not believing for a second I’d win it. But I’d had a year of prolific imagination, and I figured what the hell; at least it’d be an incentive to prioritize the story I was writing. As the days passed, though, I learned something: I can ...

Birthdays

My mother was born on September 26, 1940.

She ended up being the oldest of four, and like many children of that era, she learned at a young age how to help her mother take care of the others. (My grandfather was at war for a lot of my mom’s young years, not that he’d have helped much at home anyway.) She has memories, she tells me, of following her mother around the house, just chattering at her, talking about whatever came to mind.

I do that too. I did it to her. I do it to everyone. My f...

The Series Thing

When I was first drafting the book that later became THE COLD BETWEEN, I wasn’t thinking about a series.

I was thinking about a sequel. I had a character arc in the book—initially called ALIBI, and those of you who’ve read TCB can guess which part of the original survived—that wanted resolution. I had a very rough draft of a sequel when I started querying. But as a result of querying, the two books got folded together and became what was eventually published.

When THE COLD BETWEEN went on ...

New short story: “Unto Dust”

I’ve got a new Central Corps short story up on my other site: “Unto Dust,” set 25 years before THE COLD BETWEEN.

It’s spec fic, but really, it’s a character piece about a man dealing with the loss of his wife, and trying to parent to two teenagers through his own grief.

Here’s the beginning. Links on the bottom to read the rest, and/or to download an ebook copy.

Unto Dust: a Central Corps short

The night after Tom Foster’s wife died, he lay in the bed they used to share and s...

On Gatekeepers and Nostalgia

I see the Back In MY Day crowd is at it again.

In one of David Gerrold’s books* about the original Star Trek, he points out the show was billed as humanity’s future in space, but in fact that wasn’t what it was. Trek was 1960s USA culture in space. It was political. It pushed envelopes. It was unapologetically liberal most of the time, and often had beautiful, egalitarian visions of the future.

It was also sexist, racist, patriarchal, paternalistic, and sometimes weirdly authoritarian. Whi...

Art and Craft

World’s burning. Might as well write about writing.

Some of you know I’ve taken up drawing. I’d say “again,” since I did a little drawing years ago; but I was never particularly good, and I lacked the patience it takes to develop good skills.

I haven’t been displeased with my efforts, which have ranged from satisfying to absolutely heinous. I’m finding I can, with a tutorial, do a decent realistic pencil sketch:

Always watching…

but that I fall down a bit when color and other media ...

Naming the Problem

I live in a beautiful place.

We built on this land, with all the chaos of that; Spouse had built houses before, and I fell in love with the woods. It reminds me, to this day, of where we’d go camping every year when I was a kid: Valcour Island, on Lake Champlain. We weren’t allowed electronics–not even watches–so I brought books, and a journal, and I read and wrote and swam for a week. I remember blowing up air mattresses, the taste of the rubber; I remember the sound of the rain on my te...