January 17, 2017
When I say the word “monster,” who’s the first one that pops up in your mind? Is it Michael Myers? Cujo? Pinhead? Hannibal Lecter? As a horror fan, I’ve been fascinated with monsters since I was a little kid. I grew up with parents who took me to the drive-in to see Hell Night when I was probably around five…
January 16, 2017
They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, a weekly column where we gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we’ll be highlighting the latest installment in the Harry Potter movie franchise, a geek chic handbag, a one-of-a-kind comic book,…
January 13, 2017
The parties are over, and the lights have come down. Winter has settled over the land (at least in this hemisphere), bringing cold weather and the wasteland of television’s midseason hiatus. Now that mid-January is upon us, let us remember fonder, brighter times. Specifically, the 2016 Christmas specials of Doctor Who and Sense8. Rather than a review article of these…
January 12, 2017
Coal Hill Academy. If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you might remember the name. Or you might not. Coal Hill is the school where Doctor Who first began in 1963. It was the opening setting for “An Unearthly Child,” which featured the Doctor’s granddaughter (!!), Susan, as a student. Two of her teachers become the Doctor’s first (unrelated) traveling companions.…
January 11, 2017
Stephen King is a man who needs no introduction from someone as lowly as me. Everybody’s heard of him. Almost everybody’s read his work or watched a movie based on one of his many, many novels or short stories. I cannot claim to have read all of his work (nowhere close at this point), but I have read my fair…
January 10, 2017
Welcome back to Sound Off!, a semi-regular column where members of Speculative Chic gather together to chat about the latest BIG THING in entertainment. This time, we’ve participated in the space race in order to discuss Hidden Figures, which premiered in the United States on Friday, January 6, 2017. Sound Off! is meant to be a group of reactions, but not…
January 10, 2017
This month on Changing the Map So if the turn of the twentieth century produced the First Wave of speculative feminist fiction (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rokeya Hossain), and the late 1960’s ushered in the great Second Wave (Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood), what was happening in the middle of the century? Who were the speculative feminist writers…
January 9, 2017
They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, a weekly column where we gab about the greatest in geek. This week we have an addictive Star Wars video game, a wonderful book for fans of magical libraries, and a hilarious vampire-focused mockumentary.…
January 6, 2017
Dear Sherry, I’ve been working hard on edits on my novel. I sent it out to my beta readers, and I now have all their feedback, which is great. The problem is that I have a bunch of conflicting comments, and I don’t know how to resolve them. Sometimes it is easy. If one suggestion clearly makes the story better and…
January 5, 2017
Booksellers get a lot of questions on a daily basis. Where can I find this book? Who wrote this book? When was this book published? Is this in paperback? When will this author’s next book be available? Most of these questions are pretty typical (and normal), but there are still plenty of things that a bookseller won’t know and, unfortunately,…