by J.M. Phillippe I have been trying to write this blog for several hours now. I wanted to write something about Charlottesville, VA, and about white nationalism (how it came to be, and why we can’t just abide it). I wanted to write about meeting anger with compassion, and the struggle to do that. I […]
by J.M. Phillippe There is a saying that no villain really knows that they are a villain. We are all heroes in our own minds. But in fiction, it is also often true that heroes don’t know they are heroes. They resist the title. They push back against the events that would take them to […]
by J.M. Phillippe I first became an activist in 2008, when, on the night of Barack Obama’s historic win of the presidential election, Proposition 8 passed in California, my home state, voters declaring that same-sex couples shouldn’t have the right to marry. I happened to be watching the results with a good friend and her […]
by J.M. Phillippe A writer friend of mine told me that being in your 20s is all about unbridled optimism that anything can happen, while being in your 30s is about figuring out your limitations, and what really is possible. Limitations are hard, she said. But it makes life so much easier when you just […]
by J.M. Phillippe There comes a point in a new position where everything begins to feel routine. Where the schedule is pretty locked in, the tasks rote, and the days start to blend together. I always worry when this happens, because as the weeks whirl into months, I feel my life passes before my eyes […]
by J.M. Phillippe I have to admit that I am a little distracted trying to write a blog this week, as I am anxiously awaiting the results of the second round of the NYC Midnight Short Story Writing Challenge tonight (Tuesday, May 2nd) at Midnight. This is my second year in a row participating in […]
by J.M. Phillippe I have a confession to make: when I read books, I tend to skip through large swaths of text. It started when I was a kid, reading fantasy novels. I adore fantasy novels. But without fail, every fantasy author I have ever read has spent a tremendous amount of time describing things. […]
by J.M. Phillippe Anyone who tells you that writing is a solitary activity is telling tales. Even ignoring the number of published authors who are actually writing teams (such as The Stiletto Gang’s own Sparkle Abbey), and others who use ghost writers, no writer I have ever met has ever been published without a high […]
by J.M. Phillippe I have been reading comments on stories about Trump’s outrageous lie over the weekend that Obama had Trump Tower wire-tapped and here is how it seems to go: Trump wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t think it was true, which means there is proof of it, and we need an investigation to […]
by J.M. Phillippe I have been thinking a lot about relative experience. “Relatively speaking” is a phrase we toss around casually, an improvised rescaling of any given comparison. Hidden in the phrase is an acknowledgement that the scale of comparison has been significantly reduced to include a limited range of possible experiences or perceptions of […]