Two Short Winters

Recently, I read Brian's Winter and The Magician's Elephant back to back. It was enlightening. Both books are middle-grade novels, and shorter than average reads. One is a fierce recognition of the world's beauty and randomness. The other is about grim endurance during a dark, cold season, in which divine rescue appears to be the only hope. Oddly, the uplifting one is by Paulsen. DiCamillo's story, by contrast, reads rather like a Cliff’s Notes version of Mark Helprin’s

Book Review: What Came from the Stars, by Gary D. Schmidt

What Came from the Stars

Gary D. Schmidt

It would it be too high of praise to say that Gary D. Schmidt’s What Came from the Stars is a solid block of crazy cool braised in awesome sauce. It would not be too high of praise, however, to say that this book is special.

In the town of Plymouth, 12-year-old Tommy Pepper is dealing with the death of his mother. His traumatized little sister has stopped speaking entirely, and

The Social Media Fast, with Rochelle Melander

This January, after talking about the pitfalls of social media, Rochelle Melander and I both tried to monitor and change our habits for a month. You can read my take at Write Now! Coach. But first, here's what Rochelle has to share about her experience…

Over the winter holiday, while having coffee with Jocelyn Koehler, I confessed that I was both addicted to and sick of social media. Though I’m a habitual morning writer, I’d been checking Facebook

hello, 2013

2012 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first collection of stories, I wrote a lot, I developed better habits of work. We got our publishing company, Hammer & Birch, officially set up. And just after Thanksgiving, I published a novel and a novella under my pen name. In a sort of tilt-of-the-earth miracle, they wildly exceeded my expectations, both for sales and reviews.

So that’s cool. Really cool.

These successes have encouraged me to keep

Adventus Hibernium: Day 24

Adventus Hibernium: Day 23