Deanna Hoak

Note: None of the below is to be taken as any indication that I don’t absolutely adore my kids. I love them dearly, but it would be nice to be able to talk openly about the challenges of being a parent working at home without the fear that you’re going to be accused of not [...]

Those of you interested in the writing process might like to check out David Louis Edelman’s post “From First to Final Draft: A Case Study,” which discusses the various drafts of his novel Infoquake.

Dave talks about the copyediting a bit in the final draft, which is linked in the post. It’s really wonderful when I [...]

Apparently it’s carambola season here on the island, because the kids and I were lured by a hand-painted STARFRUIT sign to a cardboard box (honor system) alongside someone’s driveway: three star fruit for a buck. I’ve never had tree-ripe star fruit before, and it’s (unsurprisingly) much sweeter than what I’ve had from the store. Really [...]

Mary Catelli pointed this out on one of the SFWA newsgroups, and it’s too amusing not to share: “Plot Bunny Purchase Agreement,” by Valerie Comer and Erin Hartshorn.

This was an interesting quiz I ganked from D. B. Echo:

Reserved Leader
I’m not sure about the percentiles in the chart above (I wonder what they base “femininity” on that I scored so low in that regard), but the analysis in the full report seems pretty accurate.

Meme Therapy has posted answers to another question they asked me and some other folks, which was whether it was worth maintaining the “thin red line” between fantasy and science fiction.
They left off my first paragraph, where I linked a dozen or so of the “fantasy vs. SF” discussions that went around the blogosphere a [...]

Someone e-mailed me in regard to the recent plagiarism scandal and asked if plagiarism is something a copyeditor checks for.
If a passage in a novel I’m copyediting seems too familiar, I certainly do try to make sure that it hasn’t been plagiarized. (I have a bizarrely good memory for text, and I fret even in [...]

My Mensa talk went really well; it was a great group of folks. I was surprised to find that none of them were really into the blogosphere, though. So many people in SF/F are that I suppose I forget that not everyone reads blogs. I was talking about how much wonderful information is out here, [...]

Physicist James Van Allen has died. He discovered the Van Allen radiation belts, and he was an opponent of manned space exploration who once said, “I’m one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity [...]

One of the Brain Parade questions Meme Therapy asked me is up now.
They asked Marissa, too!
I had fun with that one. :-)