Jennifer M. Baldwin's Blog, page 6

Input Update 5/7/2024

Reading: Nona the Ninth Also reading: Feel-Good Productivity And reading: Reader, Come Home And finally: Building the Cycling City Watching: The Sword and the Sorcerer

What Does One Do with One’s Comics?

I used to buy a lot of comic books. So many, in fact, that I often didn’t get around to reading them each month, and then more books would come the next month, and I would fall further behind. But I continued to buy them, and store them in those plastic bags with cardboard backing […]

Creative Writing: Week ???

“Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way.” Rick Rubin, The Creative Act, p. 354 I’ve lost track of which week it is in the term. End of April and all of May are such a whirlwind when teaching high school. I feel like All the Things are happening. I can’t keep […]

Creative Writing: Week Two

I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input. It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too […]

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say? And yet, I have been thinking once […]

Creative Writing: Week One

I’m teaching a Creative Writing class for the first time in several years, and this week was our first week. I’ve got fourteen students — high school kids — and we started the week watching a movie, coloring, and eating candy (an idea I blatantly stole from Lynda Barry... sorry for being a thief, Professor […]

Creative Writing: Week 1

I’m teaching a Creative Writing class for the first time in several years, and this week was our first week. I’ve got fourteen students — high school kids — and we started the week watching a movie, coloring, and eating candy (an idea I blatantly stole from Lynda Barry... sorry for being a thief, Professor […]

Note to Self: Stop Making This Mistake!

I’m in the midst of correcting a mistake. The mistake was beginning a novel, writing about nine chapters, and not outlining the major plot points, character details, and world-building information of each chapter as I finished it (which is a thing I do: I outline after I write, not before). Instead, I wrote, wrote, wrote, […]

Input Update 3/15/2024

Reading: Finished Harrow the Ninth (then grabbed a copy of Nona the Ninth) Listening to: “Spawn of the Changing Raven” by Black Tiger (HDK 54) and “Journey Through Realm and Region” by Unsheathed Glory (HDK 154) Watching: The Tempest (Stratford Festival 2019) Playing: old NES and Sega games like Super Mario Bros. and Golden Axe

Why Castles and Knights and Dragons? Beats me.

Recently, a student asked why I like the Middle Ages so much. This was in a short fiction elective, and we’d been reading lots of genres, some sci-fi, some fantasy, some realistic, some fairy tale-ish, some Southern Gothic, some suspense. During one of our discussions, we somehow came around to my particular tastes as a […]