Category: Blog
-
My Nerd Cred, Let Me Show It You
Despite my better judgement, I have been sucked into Vikings on History channel. I say “despite my better judgement”, because I usually avoid overly violent shows, and shows with too much rape or implied rape. (Hey man, there are some things I just don’t enjoy watching.) But . . . I was also a Scandinavian…
-
The Status is Not Quo: Sexism in Fantasy
This past week, I had the misfortune of speaking with another fantasy author who thought that sexism in medieval fantasy “makes sense”. She was defending another author’s sexist assumptions about a work we were critiquing. I gave her what I hoped was my best are you fucking kidding me? look before proceeding to explain the obvious: “It’s fantasy.…
-
On Irony and The Hobbit
I have been duly informed that The Hobbit commits the grave sin of trying to imbue the story and characters with filthy, degrading Irony, of all things!!! I believe that Irony has become so crassly omnipresent that it is the most debased form of wit, far lower than jokes about unpleasant bodily functions and moribunded…
-
It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few
I have seen this meme bouncing around the blogsphere the past few days, so I thought I’d give it a try: Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you one sentence from that story.
-
A Dull Dough Sours
I am currently putting together a writing sample for graduate school applications. I had thought I would write, rewrite, and revise a short story which had been brewing in the back of my mind since December. I made it 3/4 of the way through the story, and I utterly hated it. Not in a “wow…
-
An Excerpt from “The Greek Boy”
Last night at the Colorado Springs Writers Read Series, I read an excerpt from my short story “The Greek Boy”, which is about Lord Byron. In the final months of his life, Lord Byron was preoccupied with two things: supporting the Greek struggle for independence against Turkey, and his fifteen year old page-boy, Lukas. This…
J. S. Kuiken 