Uncreated Conscience

I have a confession to make. I am completely and utterly addicted to making stopmotion and hand drawn animation films. From whence does this latent desire from filmmaking arise? I have no idea.

Another White-Harp review vlog! She stayed up so late finishing A CURSE DARK AS GOLD by Elizabeth C. Bunce that this one isn’t quite as coherent as her review of SHIVER. P.S. You can follow her vlog reviews on YouTube or Vimeo. Both she and I really thoroughly enjoyed it, and my review follows beneath [...]

So when I said I don’t want to be an animator anymore…I might have been lying. I discovered this great programme for Mac called Pencil and it may be the most awesome piece of software in the world (except for Scrivener, the greatest writing tool in all of existence). To prove my point, I made [...]

A while back my friend Kate recommended THE GOOD THIEF by Hannah Tinti, but I never got around to reading it before yesterday. Ren is one of the many orphaned wards at St. Anthony’s, hoping to be adopted by a family before he grows too old and must be shipped off to the military. Unfortunately [...]

I used to want to be an animator. NOT ANYMORE. No wonder traditional handdrawn animation became passé. Even drawing the scant 25 frames in here almost drove me batshit insane. I procrastinate a lot. I often procrastinate from doing creative things by…making other creative things. In this case, I’m trying not to look at the [...]

If any of you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been waiting (for what seems like forever) for Malinda Lo‘s ASH to be delivered to me from Amazon. ASH arrived at long last yesterday and I devoured the book in one sitting. This review comes in two parts: a review of the book [...]

Everything I learned about revision I learned from… …listening to the Writer/Directory commentary on The Lord of the Rings films with Peter Jackson and his writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. I’ve begun my annual reread of THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien (I think that ranks up there [...]

Until I watched this actress go through 21 accents, I didn’t realise we Californians had an accent. Some of her American accents are a little off. Brooklynites don’t sound like that (at least not anymore) and even to my own ear her South Carolinan sounded a wee bit exaggerated. Her French pronunciation was strange, but [...]

Sometimes, my fellow Americans frighten me. I’m amazed this kid was able to keep a straight face. They’re all intertwined: communism, fascism, socialism, they all have a little bit of each—they borrowed from each other. I think the most impressive part of this video is that the interview doesn’t offer any commentary and simply lets [...]

I’ve never quite understood the genre snobbery regarding YA novels. When people ask about my reading tastes, I stand and proudly proclaim my preference for children’s fiction (middle grade and young adult) and people don’t seem to remark on it much. “Oh,” they say, “that’s nice,” as they continue to drink their coffees while browsing [...]