Luck Be the Lady in the Locker Room

June 10, 2015

Dear A,

You’re lucky, and you’re grateful to whatever accident of fate made it so. A sign of your luck, or perhaps an outcome of it, is that you have never felt the need to pretend to be someone else to satisfy an expectation of society.

The movement to extend human rights to the LGBT community has gotten you thinking, though. You have friends and neighbors who have married someone of the same sex, and your daughter attends a school where many kids have “two mommies” or “two daddies.” Again, you’re lucky to live in a community where these families are unremarkable. But there are also people in your circle who face daily struggles between their inner and outer lives. Even in this era of acceptance, you know gay people who pretend to be straight. And then there’s the…

The Good Place

May 27, 2015

Today is my first annual 49th birthday, coming ten years after my first annual 39th. I repeat these age-vanity jokes with a smile and a wink, certain a year from now I’ll be celebrating the full half-century mark with good grace. The fact is, life so far has been pretty good. While I have my share of regrets—mistakes and missed opportunities and failures—on balance my life has gone pretty well and I still spend more time wondering what’s around the next bend than worrying about what I’ve left behind.

Still, our memories make us. They inform our present actions and drive our future reactions. Good or bad, our memories are created out of perception and emotion, which are inextricably linked. As Eric Kandel wrote in the fourth edition of his Principles of Neural Science (in the nineties, I spent a year working with Kandel…

Sock Man

4/29/2015

The sock man shuffles down the sidewalk, black plastic garbage bag in one hand, packages of new socks in the other. “Socks, socks,” he mumbles. He doesn’t cry his wares loudly like the hat peddler in the story, who matches wits with mischievous monkeys. Rather you can barely hear him. You can tell by his sagging posture and painful gait he’s in poor health. His eyes are rheumy, his tongue coated with white film. If you buy socks from him, he nearly weeps with gratitude, and it breaks your heart.

The sock man has haunted my neighborhood for a decade or more. I’ve bought socks a few times, over the years. The other day I bought a package, paying four times what I’d have paid in a store. A deli owner, outside his shop for a cigarette break, witnessed the exchange and smiled at me as I…

by A.M. Justice

We’re two weeks in to the new season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and I’m still feeling the love for this television adaptation of G.R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss continue to take the best from the books and put it on screen, with enough new characters and plot streams to keep the avid readers on the edge of our seats. I wonder, will we get to see where Sansa is going? In my recollection, she disappears from the novel’s narrative after Petyr takes her from the Eyrie. And Jamie Lannister most certainly does not hook up with Bronn and ride off to rescue Myrcella from Dorne.

GOT works because the writing is so solid and the cast is packed with great actors playing great characters. The casting choices are spot on. Peter Dinklage is too handsome for Tyrion…

Love and Marriage

April 4th, 2015

Dear Reader-

A few days ago, the writers here at OYOL and a few other friends had a spirited discussion about love and marriage. Our youngest member asked a benign question about marriage and as per our usual mode of operation, the conversation spiraled into a deep philosophical discussion. Our beliefs about love and marriage differed and the romantics and the pragmatists soon found their separate corners. I am a pragmatist, and as such, drew the pity of the romantic in the crowd. He felt sorry for me because of my beliefs. I could have made the “choice” to be upset by the comment, but instead I “chose” to sit back and solidify my ideas.

I believe one of the best philosophies a person can bring into a marriage is the knowledge that leaving is an option and loving is a choice. While on…

by A.M. Justice

About eight years ago, my husband came home from work and announced that his coworker Peter had given notice so he could become a full-time fantasy author. Curious and skeptical, I bought the coworker’s book, thinking, “Let’s see what this guy’s got.” I quickly learned he had the right stuff. From the opening lines about a community gathering together in the wake of a strange fire, New York Times Bestseller The Warded Man hooked me, and I’ve been a loyal follower of Arlen, Lessa, Roger, Renna, Ahmann, and Inevera since. My copy of The Skull Throne, Book Four of The Demon Cycle, published by Del Rey, will be delivered to my Kindle today, and I look forward to reading it on an upcoming family vacation.

I admire Peter’s tight prose, inventive storytelling, and nuanced characterizations. Arlen is one of my all-time favorite fantasy heroes, and…

For our inaugural guest, we would like to introduce A.M. Justice. Amanda is the author of The Woern Chronicles, a series that blends high fantasy, fairy tales, and science fiction to forge a story about a smart woman and a charming prince who become ensnared in a decades-long conflict between nations.

To read more about Amanda as well as her series you can visit her webpages here and here.  Without further ado, Amanda’s letter.

Lizzie Harper. Botanical Illustration – Tips on painting sketchbook-style studies of leaves – May 4th 2013

J.R.R. Tolkien, the father of the fantasy genre, wrote a short story called “Leaf by Niggle” (look for it in The Tolkien Reader). When I was a teen, just beginning to write my own stories, this story struck me as “true,” and it resonates even more strongly now. The first half of the story is about an artist named Niggle whose only work is a massive painting of a tree. The painting is never finished, and he continues to scrape away parts of it and paint them anew, because they never quite reflect his vision. Niggle’s neighbor sneers at Niggle’s lack of industry (as he spends his time painting a plant and neglects the real ones in his garden) and plagues him with requests for help running errands and doing home-maintenance projects. Niggle…

3/18/15

Convictions, Courage, and the Internet

While browsing through my Facebook newsfeed this weekend, I came across a post that made my blood boil. We’ve all experienced this: a Facebook friend posts an inflammatory message that demands a response. Heart pounding, we pounce at the keyboard and hammer out an appropriately scathing—or archly informative—reply. Perhaps we hunt for an online article to prove our point, or perhaps we merely offer a withering scold. And then we hit return.

Or, we don’t.

I stopped hitting that key a few years back after realizing the blood pressure elevations prompted by arguments with strangers weren’t worth it. But I also doused my collection of firebrands because I’d started promoting my fiction through social media, and to be frank, I feared offending potential fans. While I occasionally post a link or “like” a page some might find controversial, I do so far less often…