This is why I read blogs

So many people were showering brilliance into the blogosphere this week that I just had to collect them all into one shiny bundle:

The talented bogwitch64  pointed me to this post from Maggie Jamison at Apex Books: "A friend asked me a few weeks ago about balancing both pain and sympathy in fiction: how do you create a character who suffers immensely, but who doesn’t sound whiny to the reader?"  Read the whole post. Seriously. Because it talks about practical and simple ways to achieve this.

The...