Check out my first post on Desmog.ca

This is What 400ppm Looks Like: CO2 Levels Highest in More Than 800,000 Years. On Friday, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, recorded CO2 levels higher than the world has seen in over 800,000 years. From atop the Mauna Loa volcano on the big island of Hawaii—the oldest continuous … Continue reading »

Post-Thesis Blues and How I Became a Job Ninja

Some artists find creative fortitude in depression. Some people make themselves upset on purpose in order to produce the sad self-reflection that devastation can bring about. These artists have offered up their insides to the world. Lovely people like Joni Mitchell, Hemmingway, Joan Didion, Paul Simon and Chopin wrote break-up songs and love letters that … Continue reading »

E-Readers. Get used to it.

Remember when film cameras were being replaced with digital cameras? I distinctly recall feeling super uncomfortable about that. I’d had digital cameras in my house since they started (my mom worked for a dot-com before the bubble burst). Our first one was a bulky device that took giant photos and saved them directly to a … Continue reading »

Reluctantly Yours, The Artist.

Only children actually want to be artists – children, rich people, and boring people who are afraid of being exposed as boring people. Most of us grow up, and either learn that we aren’t interested/talented/crazy, and we move on because we are intelligent/responsible/hungry. The rest of us are either rich people/children/boring or reluctant artists. When … Continue reading »

Un-Friend All of Your Writers

Don’t make friends with writers. I am a writer and I have a bunch of friends. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling it like it is. The fact is, I think I should have fewer friends. My friends are nice friends. They love me and tell me that I am talented and they go to … Continue reading »

The Day Job vs. Bliss

It happens from time to time that a tortured artist toils and bleeds for her craft, only to die before it means anything to anyone. It also happens that an artist toils and bleeds for her craft and no one reads or cares about her work, dead or alive. But hopefully, the artist is dead … Continue reading »

Thank you, Science Fiction

Today I caught a Sunday matinée of Prometheus — a heavily criticized film that is meant to be something of a pre-Alien movie. I’m just going to come right out and say that I thought it was fine. I don’t know if I thought that because so many big block busting sci-fi films have let … Continue reading »

“I only read Non-Fiction” and other arbitrary dogmas

I’ve never understood why people feel better about themselves when they tell me that they only read non-fiction. It’s as if they think of themselves as less silly than the rest of us “dreamers” or “artists”. Whenever someone tells me that, I am immediately offended. It’s as if they’ve just told me to get a … Continue reading »

An Interview with YA Author Eileen Cook

Reblogged from PRISM international: By Elizabeth Hand Unraveling Isobel is Eileen Cook’s fifth work of young-adult fiction to date, and if my reading the entire novel in one sitting is any indication of her aptitude for it, I’d say she’s got it. She is a talented writer with a clear and steady style. She is … Continue reading »

The CCWWP: What on Earth is a Writer’s Conference like?

 Before I left on my trip to the CCWWP in Toronto, people asked me, “What exactly do you do at a writer’s conference?” Though I made things up, I didn’t actually know. I figured we’d talk about the state of the publishing industry or the fate of the Creative Writing Program in Canada. There would … Continue reading »