Columns
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LURID: Oooh Mama! Top 10 Bad Mother Figures
May 10th, 2013
LURID: vivid in shocking detail; sensational, horrible in savagery or violence, or, a guide to the merits of the kind of Bad Books you never want your co-workers to know you're reading.
Read Column →Iron Man 3: Marvel Studios Is In The Superhero Zone
May 9th, 2013
Marvel is in the zone right now when it comes to superhero films. They’ve learned from past mistakes and are primed to get these movies right. They've created a massive quilt of comic book movies that can stand on their own, but at the same time acknowledge each other and work inside a framework. (All that said, I’ll confess that the preview for Thor 2 looked pretty bad).
Read Column →Put a Cap on It: Learning the Rules of Capitalization
May 9th, 2013
Are you an OverCapitalizer? Do you capitalize every noun, every possible title, and every word that might be important? If so, you are an OverCapitalizer! You are not Alone in your Desire to make Every Word seem Important: I read at least 3-5 documents and emails each day that are riddled with haphazard capitalization. People tend to write the way they think, and sometimes, when they think something is important or noteworthy, they capitalize it. In fact, I’d say, most people over-capitalize because they just aren’t sure.
Read Column →The Best Writers Break the Rules
May 8th, 2013
A couple of months ago I finished Erin Morgenstern’s wonderful book The Night Circus. The Night Circus is a romantic voyage through a world of urban fantasy set in the late Victorian era. In many respects, it reminds me of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which is currently being made into a BBC television series. (Morgenstern herself acknowledged her love of Clarke’s book when she appeared last fall at Wordstock in Portland, Oregon.) However, Morgenstern has different sensibilities as a writer than Clarke.
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Power to the People: Magic in Fantasy
May 6th, 2013
The idea for this column came while I was working on a novel. The novel was an expansion of my story, “Card Sharp,” which features a main character with a magic deck of cards. I’ve written other stories in the universe, but I’d never quite figured out the full system behind the magic. Was it that the cards were magic and anyone could use them? Or was the magic specific to a few individuals and the cards were just the way they accessed it?
Read Column →Recap: Game of Thrones 3.06 - The Climb
May 6th, 2013
This is going to contain spoilers for this episode, and also for the books. I won't tell you what happens in the fifth book, or what I think is going to happen in the next episode, but I will talk about differences between the book and the show thus far. Deal with it. Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, given a chance to climb, they cling to the realm, or the gods, or love. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.
Read Column →Book vs. Film: Jurassic Park
May 3rd, 2013
Last month, Universal Studios re-released and converted into 3D the ultimate epic juggernaut movie experience of late Generation Xers such as myself: Jurassic Park. People, if you were twelve years old when this movie came out, then I’m sure like me you saw this thing three or four times in the theater. It was huge, and not even with preteens or early teens (tweens, they're called these days, much to my old fogey’s consternation). I remember the first time I saw Jurassic Park, the entire audience stood up and clapped.
Read Column →The End of Happily Ever After
May 2nd, 2013
[Image courtesy of Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princess series.]
Read Column →Forgetting the "Why" in the Narrative of Horror
May 2nd, 2013
Photo: Tyler Wakstein Less than a month ago (at the time of this writing), two explosions ripped through downtown Boston. The blasts killed three people and injured 264 others. As the situation began to unfold, the pressing question of the hour changed. First, we all wanted to know what was being done to make sure things were being handled as well as could be expected. This is certainly a reasonable, and even practical concern. As soon as it became clear that we were safe (for the moment), the nation’s collective thoughts turned somewhere else.
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