Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 386

To Your Unwashed Clothes Go

So, recently I had to buy a washer. Okay, didn’t have to, but while we’re between houses, it is a great convenience. We decided to make this our difficult move, so that hopefully after the house sells and we buy another we can have an easy move, in which someone packs us and unpacks us at the other end. That means this is the move where we go through the accumulation of stuff we’ve been dragging with us for years and get rid of most of it.

It also means having a washer at the house we’re movin...

It’s Not Your Job to Indoctrinate My Children – Amanda Green

*For those of you who follow Nocturnal Lives, Amanda is posting the same thing the two places today. Sorry. My entire inner circle has been hit with interesting lives recently. – SAH*

It’s Not Your Job to Indoctrinate My Children – Amanda Green

The wonderful Dave Freer has a post up at Mad Genius Club this morning about an online encounter he had with a librarian. It seems this woman really loves her job, at least that is what she kept telling him. For a moment, I was excited to read that there...

No Excuses, No Regrets

No Excuses, No Regrets

I was talking to Charlie yesterday about the problem of “social justice writing.” By which we mean writing that is more concerned with conveying the “right message” delivered by the “approved group” writer than with telling an entertaining/uplifting or otherwise interesting story-that-earns-its-own-keep.

First of all, of course, there is the fact that a story that relies on “right think” to justify its right to exist might not bother with less glamorous bits of craft such...

A Game Of Mirrors

I remember a more innocent time when we watched Law and Order AND didn’t snert behind our hands at “Ripped from the headlines.”

Now we don’t watch it, but my eyes on twitter has been branching out, and he told me their gamer gate episode was about how all these guys were upset at there being a female game developer, so they kidnapped her and raped and stuff.

Uh.

How can they even? I mean, the worst PROVEN thing that happened to one of the SJW shills in gamergate was that someone wished she would...

So I’m Sitting Here…

Trying to do a blog post, and faced with the fact that I’m in a very weird mood and also really, really tired.

For instance, the first idea was to write a short story called The Dino Who Loved me. This is because my husband was looking for an excuse to buy dinos from the modelling site. Also because of course when faced with dino-porn, my mind goes instead to a spy story with dinosaurs.

You see, dinosaurs left the world in a spaceship, but now want to see if it’s safe to come back, and then sen...

Why I Don’t Write Stories Set In Portugal, a Blast from the past in Three Parts October 2007

For those of you who have no idea why I’m answering this — there is a rather long (if polite) question in Portuguese a few entries back and because it is a polite question — for Portugal almost excruciatingly polite — it deserves an answer.

Considering I write historical fiction and that, if history were oil, Portugal would buy and sell the rest of the world, I imagine this looks odd to people from Portugal or of Portuguese descent. Unfortunately I have many reasons not to write fiction set in...

Reset!

It should be pretty amusing for future historians that the Obama administration had a brief fling with a “reset button.” Which of course actually meant something else, as per usual, but never mind that.

It should be pretty amusing because more and more I find myself wondering about progressive reset buttons.

The proximate cause of this is my finding myself, yesterday, in a Facebook argument on Brad’s page (well, okay, it was Brad’s argument, I just stuck my nose in. Look, guys, if my destiny ha...

Squid Ink

Privilege

To being with, it is my privilege to address you today. No, seriously. I’m typing this on a piece of equipment that would have made the Golden Age writers go weak at the knees, and posting it over an electronic network that would have made ME go weak at the knees 20 years ago. As in when I read in Friday of the net she used for research, I thought I’d trade everything I owned plus years of life for the right to use that.

Now I have it, and I can type my thoughts and post them for the...

When Duck Noises Fail Me

So, I’ve been packing/cleaning (painting starts this week, hoo hoo — not) house so we can put it up for sale for two weeks, and then we spent five days sitting/listening to lectures at a seminar. (Was good. Got to see Boss-Lady, aka my publisher.)

I got up much too late today, and I don’t know which of my regulars was supposed to be up. I didn’t prod him/her, obviously. Yesterday afternoon/night we got home just in time to clean and do some things that couldn’t wait any longer, like laundry an...

There’s No Business Like Writing Business

So, some of you know I finished the Superstars Writing Seminar this weekend, which is why this will be a very short post. There’s a field trip today and I’m going. (And yep, this afternoon will find me typing away on Through Fire, because I was writing by hand at the Seminar.)

Anyway, it occurred to me that writing is such a strange avocation, pulling things out of non-existence and putting them in someone else’s head that writers – by which I mean true writers, not people who write so that th...