Monthly Archives: January 2012

Six Sentence Sunday, 29 January 2012 (The Necromancer and the Barbarian: a Love Story)

“And I froze him,” Raina said, and her outlines sharpened, until there was a human-shaped void with a corona of moonlight about it, and a face, dimly seen, that might be bone or flesh; it seemed to slide from one … Continue reading

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Six Sentence Sunday, 22 January 2012 (The Necromancer and the Barbarian: a Love Story)

Elsa remembered the eerily real anatomical models in the museum of La Specola in Florence: the sleeping Venus with her braided hair and her hinged belly, that showed the layers of the insides; the fingerbones wearing the veins and arteries … Continue reading

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Apprenticing with the Dead: Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Harley wrote at the beginning of his novel The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.” Paradoxically, we can understand the foreign ways of the past if we spend enough time with its inhabitants. … Continue reading

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Six Sentence Sunday, 15 January 2012 (Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues)

Rafe looked at her, and she knew perfectly well how that translated: What am I going to say? He doesn’t even know I exist. It wasn’t as if there were serious competition, as far as she could tell, because Apollo … Continue reading

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NaNoFeed: Enter the villain (at long last!)

I know a story exists when it begins to tell itself, or when a character turns to look at me. And I’m learning, very slowly, how I need to rest between bouts. What I mean by “when a character turns … Continue reading

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Six Sentence Sunday, 8 January 2012 (Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues)

Under her, Bertie’s chest and hips and thighs softened from warm statue to hot flesh, and his lips molded to hers as he groaned into the open-mouthed kiss. His arms came around her and he tightened the embrace, as the … Continue reading

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Apprenticing with the Dead: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace

When I was 14 years old, I got a scholarship to an elite Catholic boarding school in Florida. My best friend Arlene (the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica) did too, and we were off to an adventure together across the … Continue reading

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Six Sentence Sunday, 1 January 2012 (Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues)

That was the neat thing about the slow place, although of course at the moment the world had slowed nearly to a stop, stretched as it was by adrenalin and the serious, disembodied suspicion that she might not survive the … Continue reading

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