Aly Welch's Blog, page 2

Shiver Me Timbers, Part 2

As unfun as real piracy can be, especially for struggling authors, I do enjoy our town’s annual pirate festival in the summer and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies. My family concluded our summer movie nights with one of my favorite movies, Stardust, which features lightning pirates – a cool concept relegated to a single paragraph of deus ex machina halfway through the book by Neil Gaiman. It’s the rare case of a movie improving upon the source material. Coraline and The Graveyard Bo...

Reality Bites: Literary Woes

An ongoing issue in the literary community is people weaponizing the language of social justice to excuse wrongdoing, which is not only tacky, but it minimizes real problems and weakens the language needed to discuss them. NaMoWriMo released a statement supporting the use of generative AI, and accused critics of ableism and classism – even though their critics include disabled people and people who have experienced poverty. There’s a big difference between using assistive devices to do the work ...

Reality Bites: Very Bad Things

An ongoing problem in the online writing community is people misappropriating and weaponizing the language of social justice to excuse wrongdoing, which is not only tacky and obnoxious, it minimizes real problems and undermines the language needed to discuss them. NaMoWriMo released a statement supporting the use of generative AI, and accusing critics of ableism and classism – even though their critics include disabled people and people who have experienced poverty. There’s a big difference betw...

Shiver Me Timbers!

This past month has been like a “Greatest Hits” of bad takes and worse behavior in the online world of reading and writing. A common theme is people misappropriating and weaponizing the language of legitimate issues to justify misbehavior, which is not only tacky and obnoxious, it minimizes those issues and undermines the language needed to discuss them.

Tiktok influencers have once again encouraged readers to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon that allow readers to return e-books or audioboo...

All the Single Cat Ladies

It’s been a weird month, both in the world of indie publishing and in the world at large – but I’m going to be focusing on the US for the purposes of this post because I’ll be covering a lot of seemingly unrelated ground before it all comes together.

A couple weeks ago a suicidal twenty year old obsessed with guns and bombs tried to assassinate Trump even though he was a registered Republican. The FBI found out he had been researching the nearest rallies for both Trump and Biden, and Trump just...

Cowabunga, Dudes.

A creative mind must be balanced by a disciplined body.

Splinter

Over five years ago, my sons enrolled in kenpo karate. Even though I’ve wanted to learn a martial art ever since the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie, an interest reinforced by Sonya Blade and later Buffy, it never occured to me to take a class until then. I grew up with untreated ADHD – as well as dyspraxia, which impairs balance and coordination – so I doubt I would have fared well before diagnosis and treatment. I’ve ...

Men, Women, & Bears…Oh My!

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.”

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

Growing up, girls hear early and often the dangers of leaving home alone. Even women are cautioned against early morning and late night jogs without a running partner. The concern was rarely bears or other wild animals, and when it was, men were cautioned as well. So I was...

Reality Bites: Seeing Orange

If your adolescence was anything like mine, Saturdays were all about the orange couch. I’m talking SNICK – Nickelodeon’s primetime line-up geared at then-preteens (now tweens) and teens. It opened with Clarissa Explains It All. She was funny and dressed in crazy outfits like Stacy and Claudia in The Babysitter’s Club. Then came Ren & Stimpy, a weird cartoon that did not age well (“Space Madness” is an exception, and singing the opening of the Log theme song is the surefire way for a serial kille...

Seeing Orange

If your adolescence was anything like mine, Saturdays were all about the orange couch. I’m talking SNICK – Nickelodeon’s primetime line-up geared at then-preteens (now tweens) and teens. It opened with Clarissa Explains It All. She was funny and dressed in crazy outfits like Stacy and Claudia in The Babysitter’s Club. Then came Ren & Stimpy, a weird cartoon that did not age well (“Space Madness” is an exception, and singing the opening of the Log theme song is the surefire way for a serial kille...

Superb Owls and Other News

Last month, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl – as preordained by Soros, according to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists anyway. And for all the complaints about excessive NFL coverage of Taylor Swift, her critics made sure she remained in headlines by accusing her of Satanism.

What?

You thought one of her videos featured snakes because people called her one, and not because she was repaying her dark master with a cameo?

I’d say I should have seen it coming, but I did. My first ...