Peter's new book came out a couple of days ago. It's been lauded in Publishers Weekly, Locus, the Los Angeles Review of Books; accrued a slew of multi-starred reviews on Amazon and Goodreads; inspired incredibly detailed renderings of its featured spacecraft, by fans...

I spent my four BA years reading, thinking about reading, writing about reading. I read Milton and Hesse, Lorca and Kincaid, Senghor and de Beauvoir, Borges and Whichever “Anonymous/es” Wrote Beowulf. I hunkered down in sentences and examined individual words; I built...

Last week, Peter Watts tagged me in something called “The Writing Process Blog Tour”. I’m going to be lazy, and let him outline the terms: “It’s kind of an authorial chain letter. An author receives a series of questions (presumably of interest to the reading public);...

I'll be going to London in a little over a month. I haven't been there since I was three. My personal memories of it, therefore, are non-existent. My collective unconscious-type memories of it, though, are varied and vivid. There it is, in old family photos, in...

University was really, really hard for me, at first. I'd been lucky, in high school: I'd had one teacher who didn't mind when I wrote my novel in Latin class; another who allowed one of my Canadian Lit classmates to read my oh-so-unpublished novel while the rest of us...

Months ago, Elder Daughter observed that I don't listen to music. She was right: I haven't listened to music regularly in over a year—and even then, it was old music, stuff I had on CD years before I even owned an iPod. It's been years since I heard something new and...

I came late to Stephen King. I’m not sure why: it’s not as if I’ve ever had anything against commercial genre fiction. What I am sure of: I've just discovered, however belatedly, that I get a profound kick out of his books—all of them, even the ones people tell me are...

In November 2012, I wrote about bunny love. At the time, Bunbun, aka Slippers Houdini, aka The Probe, had just been diagnosed with head tilt disease. I felt moved by what we were certain would be her imminent demise to write about bunnies in general, and about the...