by Melinda Snodgrass | Feb 25, 2015 | About Writing
So I’m writing a very emotional scene in my current Wild Card story and George R.R. had given me a note to add in thoughts and mentions of another character and earlier events in a particular exchange. I was trying to answer the note because it’s a valid note, but it was a jarring leaden intrusion into the flow of the scene. So I went looking earlier in the scene and found the perfect place to insert this call back to previous events. That’s one of the harder lessons to...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Feb 25, 2015 | Blog
I got some very interesting advice from a friend and fellow writer yesterday over lunch. She said my essays here on my blog are too long. She explained that people don’t tend to scroll. That made sense to me, and gave me an enormous sense of relief. If I don’t have to craft such long thoughtful posts I may be more inclined to post here. So I’m going to try it.
by Melinda Snodgrass | Feb 5, 2015 | Blog
It’s common among younger women to say “Oh, I’m not a feminist”. Which kinda drives me crazy since a lot of us fought very hard to get into law schools and medical schools and not have to be secretaries, nurses and kindergarten teachers any longer. I think in some ways this new generation thinks these fights are over and it’s all been settled. Weeel, it doesn’t look that way. Yes, the right has always been opposed to abortion and I agree it is a complex...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Feb 1, 2015 | General
This morning I was doing my usual scroll through various news sites to see what was going on in the world, and I ran across Mike Huckabee opining on how he could have gay people as friends — big of him. I gather this was him moderating his position that the states had the right to ignore a Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage. An issue that was settled by a little event called the Civil War. Then I read this statement: “And as a biblical issue, unless I get a new version of the...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Jan 31, 2015 | Blog
Last night I watched AMERICAN SNIPER. There had been so much heat and very little light around this movie that I had been feeling ambivalent about seeing it. It’s absolutely worth seeing. It’s a masterful piece of film making with Clint Eastwood getting out of the way and letting the story unfold in all its brutal detail. Bradley Cooper did a phenomenal job of portraying Chris Kyle his loss of humanity, his grief over that loss, and his fight to regain it cut short by the...
