Jennifer M. Baldwin's Blog, page 7

Don’t Call It a Resolution

I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, […]

Alternative December

As December rolls along, my house continues to think it’s mid-October. There are no wreaths out, no tree, no decorations of any sort. It’s the fifteenth-of-fucking-December and there is still no Advent calendar on our wall. The only thing going for us is that the Glade plugin is pine-scented. Every year, the same thing happens. […]

Bradbury’s Big Ideas

I’m teaching The Martian Chronicles again, something I haven’t done for almost a decade. I think the last time I taught a science fiction novel of any kind was 2014 or 2015 when I read Fahrenheit 451 with an Honors American Lit class (you can see my affinity for Bradbury). Of course, the first comment […]

Working Writer

I chose this title on purpose because “working writer” could mean a writer who makes her financial living AS a writer (which is probably the most common way we use the term), or it could mean a writer who has to work a different job to pay the bills (I’ll admit, this interpretation is my […]

Fantasy Lit Is Basically Prestige TV

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but when I read Jared Shurin’s observation about the influence prestige TV dramas have had on fantasy novels over the last decade, I knew immediately that he’d put into words that overwhelming but unnameable feeling I’ve been having since forever about fantasy fiction and why I feel so out […]

Writing a poem with my students

We took a rough draft poem and tried to add more imagery and stronger diction. This is what we came up with: The wound of youslices across my heart.The gash runs deep and purple,but eventually, it scabs over,leaving a jagged scar anda dull ache. Will your loss kill me? I’ve cried all my tears,run dry […]

poem

i didn’t watch the solar eclipse but worked on my novel instead, waiting for the dragon eye to open so i could ask it why modern life is so hard and why we accept humans killing other humans and who deserves punishment, and when the eye didn’t answer, i picked up candy wrappers under my […]

I’m with the band now

Ever since discovering Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, I’ve been a fan. I’ve been playing with family and friends for a few years now, but there’s always been that itch to run a public game, to sit down at my FLGS and play with strangers and initiate more people into the wonderfully weird world of DCC. […]

Keep Your Day Job

I went back to teaching last month. Not an easy decision, but a necessary one. Perhaps. I made the decision out of fear, and I’m not ashamed by it. Money is necessary to live in our world, I have children, and the uncertainty of freelance work was giving me crippling anxiety. When I switched to […]

Nineteen words

I had a daily fiction-writing streak going since early March, and yesterday I broke the streak. Didn’t write any words for my fiction. I got up late, still needed to make lunches for me and the kids, and due to an emergency sinkhole repair on the main road I usually take to work, I needed […]