Lawrence C. Connolly

Tag: fantasy

  • Genre is a State of Mind:
    Books and Authors @ In Your Write Mind

    The genre stars came out on Saturday night for the latest installment of the In Your Write Mind book event – a massive gathering of science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery, romance, and YA writers that’s held each June at Seton Hill University. This was my first time back at IYWM in four years. June is…

  • Bi-Coastal Weekend: Stories & Nightmares

    Writers do most their traveling at home. It’s inward travel, exploring memory and imagination in the creation of stories that might one day enter the real world as published stuff. But sometimes the draw of outside events cuts through the reverie, and that’s the way it was last weekend when I had writing-related gigs popping on…

  • Looking Ahead:
    This Weekend at the Milford Festival

    Sixty-four years ago, science fiction writers Virginia Kidd and James Blish moved to Milford, PA, into a home that they called Arrowhead. It was there that Virginia Kidd founded the first literary agency devoted to the sf genre and where James Blish and colleagues such as Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm wrote stories that helped…

  • Big Things Cooking in September:
    Milford Writers & Son of Monsterpalooza

    Big things are brewing this month, with the Milford Readers and Writers Festival on the east coast and Son of Monsterpalooze on the west – both on the same weekend (September 15-17) and 3,000 miles apart. Makes me wish I had a teleporter. Nevertheless, despite the distance and the impossibility of two places at once,…

  • Writer at Work: Trusting the Process

    There’s a scene in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso, a 1956 documentary that shows the artist Pablo Picasso at work. The artist starts with random lines, splashes of color. There seems to be no method in what he’s doing, but soon a few recognizable images emerge — a boat pulling a water skier, a woman…

  • Writer at Work:
    Santas, Wizards, & Life behind the Curtain

    So it’s December 1997. I’m driving north out of Oakland, toward Bigelow Boulevard and downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a gray day, light snow falling. Colored lights trim some of the buildings along North Craig Street, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. Then I see him. I clear the rise toward Bigelow Boulevard, and there he is—fourteen-feet…