I Am Afraid

Hello! This is my old blog where I wrote a few things, mostly about pop culture, so that I would have...clips? Really not entirely sure what was going on there, honestly. I was pretty young. Now that I'm a little older I'm not totally sure what to do with this website, but for now I made a "publications" page--link both at the top of the home page and on the left sidebar as well--so you can see where my short stories have appeared. Basically now that I'm going to have more than one short story available for the general public I figured I should get one of these up. I always appreciate it when I read a short story and can easily track down the author's publishing history online.  In the future, I probably won't include short story publications on the list until they're already available, but this one is kind of a big deal (my second-ever paid publication and my first-ever "pro sale" to a science fiction or fantasy magazine, which is a concept ...

I have an unusual relationship with music. For a period of several years in my twenties, I didn't have any friends I could talk about music with. So it became something I listened to alone, mostly in my car. It was more of a companion than a set dressing. And as a result, I started to engage in a very specific, personal way with the songs I chose to listen to. To this day, I'm big into narrative and theme when it comes to music. That doesn't mean I only like songs if I think the lyrics are good. It just means that if I do like a song, I'm probably going to listen to its lyrics, and think about what kind of message they convey. Which brings me to Say Anything, a band I've always had mixed feelings about but have to admit, when you get right down to it, have produced some of my absolute favorite songs. Max Bemis has a real knack for melody, and Say Anything songs often feature a kind of instrumental excess that rewards someone paying close attention to them (hi). Di...

Hello, everyone. I sold a short story, for actual money, and it's going to be published in a book that's coming out in August. The book is called Lost Films  and you can pre-order it  here  and I'll probably figure out how to make a page you can go to on this blog that has a list of my publications. I also recently started working at a job that isn't retail and is something I actually want to do at all. So things have been going well for me recently. Let's talk about Betty Who. Betty Who is an Australian pop singer who I first heard while working at Bloomingdale's, the most retail of all the retail jobs I've worked. Most of the time it's a curse to listen to the music they play in the store where you work forty (or more) hours a week, so when a song I didn't hate came on I tried to make the most of it. And Betty Who's songs kinda made me want to dance, so I memorized a lyric or two and looked her up. I thought she might have some fun catchy son...

About two months ago I got hit by a car. It slammed into my lower right leg and snapped the tibia and fibula bones inside like the twigs they are. Then the car drove away, and despite the presence of witnesses, it is unlikely its driver will ever be caught. I always knew that it was possible for something like this to happen to me, but I also knew it was unlikely. And that knowledge was enough for me to be slightly incautious. I almost always crossed the street in crosswalks, and only when I had the right of way, and that was what I did on the night I got hit, too. But I didn't do everything possible to avoid putting myself in the path of a moving car. Because that would have been hard, and I had other things to think about. And because I trusted in the likelihood that I would be okay. Donald Trump is the 45th President-elect of the United States. So I've been thinking about the belief that things will be okay, and the reality that they might not be, a lot lately. I didn...

Well obviously any post on this subject is bound to be nonsense, because different books may be easy to read quickly for different reasons. Plus, if it were possible to explain in like 1,000 words how to write in such a way that you know how fast it will be read, then it would be a lot easier for everyone to do that and this whole "writing" thing would be solved in an afternoon. I do not pretend to have such a grand solution. But.  But. Recently I read the novel Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile for a class. I procrastinated, of course, which meant I had to read it real fast. Luckily, I found that I was able to speed through page after page without feeling like I didn't understand what was happening. And I started to wonder why. I've always found that I can read some books very quickly, while I find myself reading the same sentences over and over in others. But I'd previously put this down to some unknowable quality of prose, some part of the "magic...

Um hi hello and welcome to this blog that I made. I plan to talk about things that scare or bother me, which is everything all the time, but for your sake I will limit my posts here to the subjects of books, movies, other storytelling media, and possibly current events. I won't post often. I will undoubtedly make changes to the blog and to the style of my posts as I continue to maintain this site. For now, let's just talk a little about a really good movie about a 13-year-old witch girl named Kiki. Hayao Miyazaki is rightfully one of the most celebrated Japanese filmmakers alive today, but young adult fans like myself can have a tendency to focus on his more violent, adult-oriented films. For most of my teens and early twenties my friends who were Miyazaki fans and I reserved most of our praise for Princess Mononoke , a movie in which a guy shoots an arrow from a longbow so powerfully that it takes both his target's arms off at the elbow. (There used to be a link ...