Carmen Clarke

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Veruca. It means wart in Latin.

Yeah, Ursula is my fave. I wish there were more like her.

Tell me a work of speculative fiction you've read recently that made you fall back in love with the genre. But it needs to:
1. Grapple with big ideas.
2. Not involve time travel. (I'm not feeling that one right now).

Just finished a short story today that spans 9 years. I thought about the guideline that the timespan should be narrow for short stories, but it’s just a guideline. You may break that guideline!

A good paragraph does a lot of things simultaneously. A great paragraph does lots of things simultaneously while the reader focuses on only one thing.

#writing I just discovered I have aphantasia. How many other of you writers have it?

It surely is. Because of the way I process language, it is much harder for me to listen to a book than to read it. But there should be no hierarchy of reading>listening.

I have a question for neuroscientists and education specialists: Does anyone know what percentage of people can actually lose themselves in a book? What if, like dyslexia, there are a lot of people who can't do this? Maybe we should stop treating it like a moral failing.

As someone who grew up in the 80's, I have been confused about why younger people are nostalgic for them. The 80's were boring. Crushingly boring. Now I realize that the 80's were the last time society and technology were changing slowly enough for most people to keep up. And that's what we miss.

I had my grandmother’s copy of this book and cherished it. Then my husband let my toddler rip it up. I must look in to getting a new copy.

Power steering

Dictatorships whose rulers rape girls on an industrial scale. Based on a true story, written by a master. Timely. Read it in Spanish if you can.

I'm training myself to stop using moral panic ("I'm outraged, heartbroken, terrified") more sparingly as a form of protest. More than just feeding the trolls, it saps our energy and signals to others that this is what "good" people are doing to resist.

Yeah, that's right. I misremembered. But it's still gross that he won't get together with his old flame because she's too old for him now. The Haydee character is stomach-turning.

Whaa? I love Vanity Fair. The end of TCOMC is pretty gross (he gets together with his lost love's daughter? Yuck!)

Chthonic. One of my favorite words. Also, autochthonous.

So many posts about getting words in like it's physical exercise. That's not how my creative process works. When I'm on fire, I write 20,000 words a day. When I'm not, there's no point in sqeezing junk out of myself. How do you nurture your creativity? #writing

Possibly the coolest British-Mexican cultural mashup since Boy George discovered La Lucha.

Wow. I think I'm in love.

If they are vacuuming up all our data, why can't they even sell us stuff we want? I question how powerful AI has really become if it can't come up with suggestions a fraction as good as a bookstore employee's. The profit motive is enormous and yet this is all they've got.

I got KU to try to understand how the recommendation algo works. Despite having close to 1000 rated books on GR, it gives me terrible recs. AI ought to be perfect for this, right? So why can't it connect me with great authors, esp indie?

I got KU to try to understand how the recommendation algo works. Despite having close to 1000 rated books on GR, it gives me terrible recs. AI ought to be perfect for this, right? So why can't it connect me with great authors, esp indie?

Is he six feet tall, airborne, and melt airplane windows?

Today I was standing in my yard and a big garbage truck stopped. The driver got out of the cab and walked over to me. He said, "Your garden looks really amazing!" I think this is the nicest thing that has happened to me in like, ever? Hooray for sanitary waste collectors!

You think taking a civics class would make them act better?

First two were good. Then he repeats himself.

The Earth Abides. Solaris. Roadside Picnic.

I actually had pineapple protein disks in my dystopian novel! This one looks a lot better than what I came up with.

The cruelty is the point