Seriously? You’re Playing the Amnesia Card?
This week’s blog post is a quick (or at least somewhat scattered) combination rave and rant. The rave is me sharing a show I’ve been enjoying lately. As for the rant, you may remember a post a while back on things that can jolt you out of a story (How Factual Do You Want Your Fiction?). This week I stumbled upon another very specific story jolter, and I thought I’d share. A lot of people claim we’re in a Golden Age of TV, and there do seem to be a lot of quality shows on television now. I don’t have Read more…
A Stories I Love Holiday Tradition: Thunderheart
Last week, in addition to eating yummy foods we usually don’t take the time to fix (mmm… gravy), my husband and I indulged in another Thanksgiving tradition. Almost every year for—let’s just say a lot of years—we’ve watched the same movie. (I even stuffed it in my suitcase when an earthquake sent us to England during the month of November, but that’s a story for another time.) And it never gets old… Thunderheart is the story of a gung-ho FBI agent, Raymond Levoi (Val Kilmer), assigned to investigate a murder on a Native American Reservation in South Dakota. Tensions on Read more…
The 100th Blog Post, with Stories I Love: The Last Policeman
The Blog turns One Hundred today—woo hoo! Well, at least this is one hundredth entry posted, so I thought I’d share something special. Today’s Stories I Love features the book that got me (for good or ill—depends on who you ask) to finally jump into the world of indie publishing. Nope, it’s not nonfiction. It’s a mystery. And a sci fi. A mysti-fi? Imagine that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth. We don’t know exactly where, but we do know when—six months from now—and we know it will be catastrophic. What do you do with your remaining days, and Read more…
Stories I Thoroughly Enjoy: Zero Effect
Raise your hand if you remember the 1990s. (Unless you’re wearing a T-shirt you bought at a Nirvana concert; then you can keep it down.) Bill Pullman is one of those actors that I don’t initially remember being in things (my sleeping brain thanks me for blocking out The Serpent and the Rainbow, and all other Wes Craven movies), but he was in a lot of movies in the 1990s. They ranged across multiple genres, from the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping to David Lynch’s Lost Highway (yes, I consider Lynch to be his own genre) to the blockbuster Independence Read more…
Stories I Love: Vera (The DCI, Not the Waitress)
When I first began sharing Stories I Love, I focused on the mysteries that I return to again and again, like comfort food for the story-lover’s soul. Over the past year, I’ve worked my way through most of those, and the Stories I Love have expanded to include other character-driven narratives that I’ve happily stumbled across, but haven’t made it into my regular rotation yet. (I’ve learned that character-driven narratives are what my brain craves like Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter World. Mmm, peanut butter.) This week, I was thrilled to binge-watch a new show with my husband, and even Read more…
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