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Maggie was 14 when she decided to defeat the dragon. No one else had even come close. All the men had failed. And it was ridiculous because everybody knew the dragon was just an illusion. Even his name, Prism, was a hint. The dragon had been conjured by a curse designed to trap the villagers […]

They came to the wrong person, but I could hardly blame them. How could they have possibly known? Recently “they,” a company, emailed me about a contest they were holding. They wanted me to help them promote their science fiction writing contest on Twitter. Although I love writing and science fiction, something stubborn inside me

To me the solution was simple. I could sleep with my friend Lamby The Lamp turned on. But my dad would have none of it. My sneaky attempts to switch the light on after he had left my bedside fell to ruin as soon as he saw the bar of light beneath my door. To

How often have I heard the sage advice, never feed an internet troll? Yet I did it anyway. But sometimes the on-line aggressors are terribly hard to ignore. Trolls get personal. They go after your ego; seek to identify and target insecurities, thrive on your fears of seeming silly or being judged. They know that

They dreamed they were people. In their dreams they had arms and feet. They had ears and noses. They walked and jogged and dieted and paid taxes. But if you could have seen them as they really were in the black void of space, you would have made out the broad curves of planets draped

In the early seventies as I was about to enter kindergarten, the adults around me spoke in fretful tones. They would say, “You are going to be in a classroom with black kids. How do you feel about that?” I felt nothing at all about that. At age four I had far graver concerns. I

When recently I told a neighbor that I was a writer, her eyes lit up. \”I am too! I just sent a manuscript to an agent. Do you belong to a group?” I told her no. I could have said why, but I decided to keep my thoughts to myself. “Well, I go to a

“No, no, no, please,” Duffy said, cradling her head in his arms, “Gena, please wake up.” It seemed like a reasonable request. Though her bare chest did not stir, she could have passed for being asleep. Her face was still rosy with living warmth, her dark brown hair shiny as ever before. There was even

I have observed it in others and noticed it in myself: a discomfort with silence. I am not afraid of silence in general. At times it is like music. Exceptions are cases where I write to someone and get no response; that can be uncomfortable, particularly if I have revealed personal information that I had

In the fall semester of my senior year of high school, my bipolar disorder manifested for the first time. It was far from subtle. I would never have guessed it would have happened to me. I was a quiet straight A student who rarely did the unexpected. My problems began only a few weeks after