http://backbooth.thesane.net Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:35:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of the best parts of having pets is the way they draw my attention to things I might otherwise miss. Many of us humans spend a lot of our time blundering through the world unaware of the nonhuman life that surrounds us. But our animal companions are usually much ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2012/01/30/the-squirrel-and-the-story-at-nup/ I love music. Have done most of my life. Although I never had aspirations to be a musician of any sort, some of my earliest childhood memories involve singing while I played. As I grew up, music continued to play an import role in my life, be it in my ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2012/01/07/the-first-song-at-nup/ I recently followed a link to an article by JA Konrath about rejections (the writing kind, not the personal kind). Konrath wrote a thriller called The List, which was rejected by several major publishers. Frustrated, he went on to self-publish the book and is, he claims, earning about $9,000 a ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/12/29/is-the-titanic-sinking/ One year ago, a thoroughly delightful fellow named B.T. Newberg started the Humanistic Paganism website. Originally envisioned as a place for Newberg to share his own thoughts and feelings on the marriage of a humanistic worldview with a neo-Pagan practice, HP has blossomed into an amazing community of non-deistic Pagans ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/12/23/happy-birthday-humanistic-paganism/ I thrive on deadlines. If I'm honest, they're the only way I really get things done. I'm told I've been this way most of my life: my kindergarten teacher used to complain to my parents that, when she gave us an assignment that was due at X time, I would figure ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/12/21/why-i-smackdown/ When I was in school, the English language seemed so easy. Girls were shes and boys were hes and that was all we needed to know. Then I grew up and went out into the world and met people who consider themselves both she and he, neither she nor he, something ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/12/17/a-song-for-dark-at-nup/ Yesterday I attended a MinnSpec event for which writers anonymously submitted the first thousand words of a story or novel for the privilege of having said excerpt ripped to pieces by current and former slush readers of respected spec publications. This was a fantastic education in the business of writing, ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/12/12/tenacious-e/ I really enjoy when writers open a story by throwing me into the middle of characters' lives or the events of the plot and leave me to puzzle things out as I go, revealing bits and pieces of the back story as we progress. This feels, to me, more like ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/12/04/whats-she-building-in-there-at-nup/ The creative process fascinates me. Not just the finished products that artists produce, but the ways in which we go about producing them, and deciding to produce them in the first place. I especially love creative interplay between artists and forms. One quiet evening, during a game of Wise and Otherwise, ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/11/24/stars-in-love-by-jessica-prescott/ Leora and I don't much give Winter Solstice gifts. To avoid the consumerist insanity that often accompanies the winter holidays, we give gifts to each other and Leora's family at Samhain, while with my family, we focus on birthdays. So I had to giggle when Cara Schulz of the Pagan ... http://backbooth.thesane.net/2011/11/22/pagan-newswire-collective-solstice-gift-picks/