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A Cup of Kindness
Why, hello! I haven’t blogged since August! This semester has truly been the most exhausting and hectic academic term of my life. I started off with back-to-back illnesses (food poisoning followed immediately by an interminable chest cold), then had a perfect storm of time consuming coursework and travel (a really fun Monday night Camden/Tuesday morning…
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We’re Gonna Sing It Again
So I rounded out the summer by having a full on religious experience in a theater. In other words, I saw Hadestown with my family a week and a half ago, and it was incredible. I loved it; I ugly-cried. When I was younger, I cried all the time at media, but now it takes more to…
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A Breath
Not a lot of people read this blog. Transparently speaking, it more or less exists to prove to any publishing professionals who might go looking someday that I’m a real person who thinks seriously about this whole storytelling thing. It’s also often fun to blather about whatever’s on my mind that month to the handful…
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On Such a Timeless Flight
As far as forms of storytelling go, I’m pretty one-note. I’m a novelist. Honestly, I’ve never really tried my hand at anything else. Sure, in college I had to write short stories for workshops, but I mostly cheated and used pieces of longer ideas that I had. Some forms don’t really personally interest me; others…
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Things I Never Seem To Learn When Starting A Story
This month’s blog post is in honor of reaching my first do-over of my current project. Now, I have accepted that I’m not a very good outliner. I can’t seem to gauge if a plot will make sense until I try to write it; what may seem logical in bulleted form often turns out to…
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Gods and Monsters Presentation
Hello, class and also readers of my blog! I am hilariously inept at technology, so this is my convoluted way of supplying a link to my PowerPoint for the class where the narration will still works, because I don’t know how to make presentations in anything other than PowerPoint and, since it’s finals time, didn’t…
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How To Respect Young Readers And Also Stop Annoying Me: A Field Guide
Dear everyone: stop pitching me your picture book ideas. The first and frankly best reason for this is that I don’t write picture books! I had to try my hand at it for a workshop in my Master’s program, and while the experiment was kind of fun, the end result was very bad. I don’t have any…
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Disasters Learning To Love
What should I write my blog about this month? I asked myself when I woke up this morning and realized it was the last day of February. I answered that question with another question: Well, what’s just about the only thing you’ve thought or cared about this month aside from all the schoolwork you have to do? And…
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Kathleen Will Never Shut Up About Les Mis, Part II: Anger Edition
You may recall that when the BBC’s Les Miserables miniseries was announced, I had a bit of a wish list. All I really wanted was a few trifles, really: constant symbolic light imagery, radical politics, and a transformative moral and spiritual experience. Now, I knew that I would not get everything I desired. For one thing, the…
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Multitasking
Happy almost 2019! This was a year of many changes in my life, as you may gather from the embarrassing dearth of actual posts on this blog. Didn’t exactly nail that particular 2018 New Year’s resolution. But 2018 was nothing if not a learning experience for me, and I will be taking what I learned…