Just Pancakes
When I was a kidlet, summers were often spent with my grandparents at their wonderful Island Lake house. Weekends meant pancakes one day and waffles the next, and these simple breakfasts, shared at a sunny kitchen table (and not in the formal dining room), stick in my mind as one of the best things about […]
Cookie Theory
In theory, these cookies should be great, but they’re…so strange. They look delicious, but again, they’re…disconcerting. They don’t firm up, they don’t even really bake, they’re just…alien. I’m not even sure if I have an idea how to improve them — so let’s see what we figure out. These came from Skinny Mom, and the […]
Dear Dave Truesdale
Dear Mr. Truesdale, I am not sure you will remember me. You were the first — the only — editor to call me about a story submission. You wanted to talk about how much you liked the story and how you would do your best to recommend that it be published, but you could make […]
Cheese Crackers
All of last week, I was craving cheese crackers. And they’re terrible for a person — have you ever looked at that list of ingredients? They tend toward terrifying — sugars that aren’t sugars — and let’s not even talk about how the box size grew smaller but the price went up. I’m not going […]
We, As One, Trailing Embers
“We, As One, Trailing Embers,” is the newest story in my collection of traveling circus stories. As with all of the circus stories, they usually begin with the spark of a real world something; in this case, it was a fire that consumed Dreamland, an amusement park on Coney Island. (This is also tackled in […]
Lemon Pound Cake
I would like to say it was all Wendy‘s fault because she asked me about lemon cake recipes, but fault also rests with Jen, who sent me a wee lemon cake over Christmas. So, these fabulous women are to blame, and I could do nothing more than make a lemon cake. Right? Right. I asked […]
Haunted Houses
Sometimes the world is stranger than you know. Stranger than you can know. What do you do when you emerge into a place you cannot explain and must fight to understand? When there are no answers, but only more questions? When everyone you have known is dead? You keep walking. This sounds a lot like […]
In Praise Of: The Princess
One of my earliest memories relating to a heroine is that of Princess Leia. I remember distinctly that first glimpse of her — sneaking, hiding, programming a wee robot (I couldn’t figure out “droid” at that point to save my life), and oh she was crafty and stealthy and she had a gun to defend […]
Flash, ah ah!
Flash fiction is not my favorite and anyone who knows me knows this. I don’t hate it — Shimmer has, in fact, published some really awesome flash. I suppose I’m picky about the form. I don’t like it when it exists only to set up a pun ending, and I don’t like it when it […]
Dear SFWA, the Second
Dear SFWA, I’ve written to you before — I am sure you will remember, because it’s been an interesting and active eleven months. And surprisingly, I don’t mean that in a snarky way. I am generally encouraged by the things I have seen. Mostly, I am excited about the changes to The SFWA Bulletin. I […]