L.E. Carmichael's Blog, page 31
June 15, 2017
Brick and Mortar Magic: How to Have a Great Book Signing
After I got my PhD, I went to work at a bookstore. This was partly because my brain was fried and I wanted to relax with the pretty books. It was also because, as I writer, I wanted to understand how the retail end of the book business actually functioned – and how real humans behave when choosing new books. It was revelatory – and now I share those revelations with you. How To Have a Great Book Signing As publishers’ marketing budgets continue to be slashed, authors are finding that self-promotion is ever more necessary. One time-honoured way […]
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June 10, 2017
Wonder Woman: I Laughed, I Cried, I Felt All the Feels
Tech Support took me to see Wonder Woman yesterday.* It restored my faith in superhero movies. This is a superhero movie that’s actually about something – something much more than good versus evil. This is a movie about right and wrong, which is a much more complex and difficult question. Especially when there’s more than one right, but you can only pick one of them to fight for at any given moment. And if the potential to do right in the future means ignoring the wrongs right in front of you, what do you do? Well, if you’re Diana, you say […]
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June 5, 2017
How Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Saved Lives
One of the coolest things about fiction (especially science fiction) is how it inspires scientific discovery in real life. Cell phones – inspired by Star Trek communicators – are a classic example. Edmond Locard is another. Locard was a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes novels, in which the great detective solves crimes using the tiniest of clues. The books were one of the reasons that Locard became a forensic scientist. He not only pioneered the field of trace evidence – microscopic clues – but defined Locard’s Principle, “every contact leaves a trace.” Meaning that during a crime, physical evidence transfers between the […]
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May 20, 2017
What is Up With Daredevil Season 2?
Before life happened, I wrote about Netflix’s Daredevil and some of the reasons his character makes me slightly uncomfortable. I’ve been watching Season 2 though, mostly because I just found out about The Defenders, and I harbour a deep and abiding love for Jessica Jones, so I want to be caught up. Now Daredevil is making me uncomfortable for totally different reasons, though. Am I the only one that feels like they didn’t actually know where the story was going when the started filming this season? I’m halfway through and I feel like the screenwriters are making it up as they go […]
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May 18, 2017
When You Wake Up One Morning and Realize Two Months Have Gone By
Apparently it is May. And not just a little bit May, but the kind of May that is most of the way to June. Sigh. You know those times when work goes nuts and you have two family emergencies on opposite sides of the country and then you find out that after a year of living in the soul-sucking uncertainty of limbo, you ARE actually moving to a new province after all, and what if potential home buyers in your very cold real estate market hate everything about the house you’ve lovingly cared for over the past six years? Those times when LIFE […]
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March 18, 2017
Daredevil, Graceling, and the “Disability Superpower” Trope
I recently started watching Daredevil on Netflix (yes, yes, I am once again so far behind the curve that the rest of you are lapping me). I’m only three episodes in, and while I’m enjoying the supporting characters, I’m feeling kind of uncomfortable with Daredevil himself, because he strikes me as a perfect example of the “Disability Superpower” trope. For those unfamiliar, characters that embody this trope are given superpowers that either: cancel out their disabilities, making them non-issues OR give them abilities that people without a similar disability wouldn’t have anyway. I also have a visual impairment, but mine is […]
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March 13, 2017
Let’s Give an Entire Nation Jet Lag, Why Don’t We?
I hate Daylight Savings Time. Hate it. My mental functioning is very tightly linked to sunlight. I want naps on rainy days, and the darkness of winter is a terrible trial for me. That’s why I celebrate Winter Solstice as much as I celebrate Christmas, and why living in Yellowknife for three years made puberty even more painful than it is for most kids – between October and January, I’d go to school in the dark and come home in the dark. That’s a long, long time for a sleepy, cranky, teenager not to see the sun. Hence my hate for […]
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March 9, 2017
The Warm, Fuzzy Hug That Is Meg Cabot
When crisis strikes, where can you turn for comfort? If friends who bring you chocolate aren’t quite enough, and assuming that you’re a bibliophile like me, you’ll probably resort to one of your favourite books. In the manifestation of someone else’s imagination, you’ll escape your own life for just a little while. By the time you finish reading, the world will seem a little bit lighter. Today is the anniversary of my mom’s death, so I offer an ode to my favourite source of literary comfort – Meg Cabot. Meg is probably best well known for The Princess Diaries series, which […]
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February 18, 2017
Frightened by My Own Imagination
Writing a novel is a lot more personal than writing non-fiction. Non-fiction is external – I find and repackage information. Fiction, in contrast, comes from the inside, and sometimes what’s inside is a bit… surprising. When I first started working on my YA fantasy, I got a lot of feedback (some from professional agents and editors) to the effect that it wasn’t edgy enough. My villain, after all, is after world domination, and if he’s too cuddly, readers won’t believe he’s ruthless enough to pull it off. So I rolled up my mental sleeves and reached for my dark side. My nice side did not […]
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February 10, 2017
Work-to-Rule Is Costing Me Money, But I Stand With Nova Scotia Teachers
Back in September, I got some pretty fantastic news. More schools had booked me as a guest speaker than any other author in Nova Scotia’s Writers in the Schools Program. Including the inimitable Don Aker, a fact so shocking I still haven’t gotten over it. I had a joyful visit at Mount Edward Elementary in October, and was gleefully booking the rest of my season when the Nova Scotia Teacher’s Union announced that, due to ongoing contract disputes with the government, teachers would now be “working to rule.” Since the letter of their contracts do not include things like supervising […]
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