Blog Archives

8th March 2011: Cross-gendering Twelfth Night

As you can imagine, cross-casting Shakespeare is something I’ve thought about a lot — in Ha’Penny, the female protagonist is an actress cast as Hamlet because cross-casting is this year’s fad in alternate history 1949. Ursula Le Guin talked on

Posted in Theatre

9th February 2011: Light

When I got off the bus, sunlight was coming through a gap in the clouds to the west and shining directly up onto a huge bank of clouds to the east. They were great big folded snowclouds, and they were

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Writing

22nd November 2010: An old old poem

I cleared my table before my aunt came, so there’s space around the laptop and as I was looking at the new black (not yet named) laptop on the wood I remembered a poem I wrote when I was seventeen.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Writing

31st October 2010 Protagonismos

It’s a while since I’ve felt the need to make up a word to talk about writing. I used to do it all the time. I used to think there were words for these concepts but I didn’t know what

Posted in Writing

27th October 2010: Osheen and St Patrick

(A blessing on all those who hear this story, and a blessing on all those who tell it.) One of my favourite subgenres of Celtic stuff is the stories (recorded by Irish monks between the 7th and the 9th century)

Posted in Human culture, Whimsy

4th June 2010: These fragments have I shored against my ruins

I was pegging out clothes on the line this morning, and thinking to myself, the way you do: “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight,

Posted in Books, Thessaly

16th March 2010 Useful things I learned about writing from roleplaying

Lisanne Norman said on a panel at Convocation in 1997 that writers should watch people playing tabletop fantasy roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons to learn how to write fantasy. Steve Brust and I both immediately disagreed with her so

Posted in Writing

16th Febuary 2010: Jo Walton is — very silly sometimes

I was making a profile for Google Buzz (which I have no idea whether I’ll use or not) and it asked for a bio. I hate writing bios, and it occurred to me since it was Google to see who

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Whimsy

11th December 2009: Is This the Kind of World You Want to Live In?

One of the things that’s making me angry about the Peter Watts thing, beyond the fact that it’s happened at all, is the way so many people in comments at BoingBoing and at Whatever and all over are saying that

Posted in Human culture

1st December 2009: 45 Today

I’m awake ridiculously early because I’m excited because it’s my birthday. I thought I was supposed to grow out of that, and I suppose I may, but not yet. AM is here, and we’re going to meet Z for breakfast

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, My Books, Writing