Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (TLP) left me in a love conundrum. More...

*Don't forget to renew your subscription to Irreantum!  Our new issue just went to the printer.  Check it out here.*

A few weeks ago, a family member asked me a question. “Okay,” she said, “tell me one more time … what you mean when you say literary?” She admitted that she’d once thought the word was only used by certain people to assert their superiority over others. “Are there actual standards?” she asked.

How would you have answered? More...

The recent Utah execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner via firing squad became national news, and led to inevitable editorializing pro and con the death penalty.  Because Utah is the only state that allows for firing squad executions, Utah is presented, by those who oppose the death penalty, as a particularly benighted state, and the discredited doctrine of blood atonement usually gets attention.  Blood atonement is, as Scott Card once put it, "a doctrine never taught in the Church, especially by Jedediah M. Grant."  But Gardner's execution had, for me, a personal historical context unrelated to blood atonement.  Only three Utahns have been executed via firing squad in the last 70 years.  Gardner's one; Gary Gilmore (of Executioner's Song fame) was another.  The third was a man named Donald Condit, who was executed in 1940 for murdering my grandfather. More...

After I had written my last AML blog post I realized two things: (a) I had forgotten to list Sweethearts among some of the best loved edible writings ... ever, those adorable Valentine's Day confections, those little tasty love "tweets" and (b) the Old Testament has some noteworthy, if not kind of crazy at times, ideas about writing, as pointed out by William Schniedewind in his wonderful book How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel, the chief inspiration/blame for my last bit on edible writing. In this post I will do two things: (i) share some of Schniedewind's Old Testament insights on writing and (ii) suggest that these insights have a continuing direct bearing on Mormon authors today. Please forgive my lack of footnotes below--using books on Kindle makes it impossible to adequately document your sources. I have no similar excuse, however, for the absence of substance in this post and my obvious cribbing from Schniedewind. More...

As the founder and president of LDStorymakers (pronounced LDS Storymakers), I’ve had many questions about the group and decided that here would be the perfect place to outline our founding, our purpose, and who can join.

In October 2002, the Pleasant Grove library held an author book signing event, where I met Josi Kilpack and Julie Wright. We had a good discussion about the LDS market and publishing. They’d learned a lot while publishing their novels, but like most newer authors (and even more established ones) they had a lot of questions. I asked them if they’d be interested in joining an online LDS author group where we could all share our experiences and help each other. They said yes. The next day I started a Yahoo group, then called LDSSmallPressWriters, and sent Josi, Julie, and other authors I knew invitations to join.
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There's a musical playing right now at BYU that I'm not going to see.  Casey at the Bat it's called, and already I'm cranky.  I'm on the committee that decides these things--I've read the script.  That's why I'm boycotting it.  It's not just a bad book for a mediocre musical.  Lots of musicals have bad books--'book' means 'script' in musicalese--including some really popular ones.  My favorite is the Elton John Aida.  Okay, at the end of the musical, Radames, the Egyptian prince, and Aida, the Nubian princess/slave he's fallen in love with are running from the cops/Egyptian army.  There's this bridge.  If they cross the bridge, they're safe.  If they don't cross the bridge, they'll be captured and tortured to death.  They stand on the bridge.  They sing a very long love duet, which goes on long enough for the cops/Egyptian army to catch up with them.  Honestly, I'm not kidding, that's what happens. They sing and sing and sing and get their silly butts caught. Apparently, it never occurs to them to sing once they're across the bridge; nope, that song's gotta get sung right that very second.  I laughed out loud in the theater, earning the eternal enmity of many many weeping coeds.  When they die together--tragically, so tragically--I kept thinking about the Darwin awards, how killing these two dunces just improved the gene pool something considerable.  I mean, that's bad writing. Right?  Well, Casey at the Bat is worse than that. More...

It all started when Steve broke up with Carol around the fall of 1977. That every guy in my high school class wanted to date her was one of those truths held to be self-evident. She was funny, athletic and beautiful, but before this declaration of her independence it would have been futile to spend any romantic energy her way since Steve was equally funny, athletic and handsome, and, after all, our friend. One day after their breakup I asked Steve, in a hypothetical tone, whether he would mind if I asked her out, and, more importantly, did he think she'd go out with me if I did. He said he didn't mind and added, after some thought, that he saw no reason why she would not go out with me. As reassuring as that wasn't, it was all the encouragement I needed. And, after a little behind-the-scenes assistance from Laura, Carol 's best friend, I secured a date.  More...

A little over a decade ago, I had met several of my goals as a writer. I had won awards and published books. Strangely, I found that publishing wasn't that big of a deal. Neither was winning an award. I even faced a rather embarrassing situation after I was given a medal for my fiction. I was joking around with my family and put the medal on, saying, "What if I really wore this thing?" Then, of course, I forgot that I was wearing it. Sure enough, company arrived, and there I was wearing my medal, as though it were part of my daily wardrobe. It was like answering the door wearing a tiara, swimsuit, and a queen's robe.

I could write stories which made it into some good journals, but I wasn't at all sure that a well-crafted sentence mattered much--certainly not nearly as much as it once had, when I was embarking on my dream to become a published writer. Now I really wanted to write something of importance, not just something that might win an award. I wanted to consecrate my talent, and I prayed for guidance to do just that. More...

Stop the treadmill! I want to get off. Or even just slap it down a notch. But my publisher is wondering where my next manuscript is, my children need help with scouts and a science project (my daughter could use a bath, too, but that might be asking a little too much of me), and if I don’t do laundry my children may have to resort to their dirty clothes basket. (Hey, at least they had root beer floats today—I’m a hero.)

This week I had two major deadlines, including my latest manuscript for my publisher, who has been all kinds of patient. Though I usually write only during the day, this week I spent the better part of three evenings working to finish, mostly after I put the children to bed. Then in order to drag my exhausted body out of bed the next morning, I’d have to tell myself I’d go back to bed after the kids went to school. Actually, I use this tactic often. Of course what I really do is turn on the computer and sit there until they get home again because the magic always kicks in and sleep means nothing after that. Sometimes I remember to eat breakfast before one. More...

In my last post, I ranted (who, me? rant?) about writers who put a message before the story, how messages in books will come across more powerfully if they aren’t put there intentionally. How I hated people asking what message I put in Tower of Strength. (I didn't! Yes, there are messages and themes, but they developed on their own.)

Then I got an interview form for my upcoming Band of Sisters, which will be featured in Covenant's Book Worms newsletter. One question made me take a step back and rethink the whole message thing—had I done exactly what I professed to hate?

The question was something like: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

That's almost a backhanded way of asking what message you put into it, and I was scared, because I had an answer.

But then I realized that in a sense, it's a different question altogether, because after a book is written, you can look back and see things differently than you did while writing it.

I realize that some people will still read Band of Sisters and assume I wrote it to "teach" readers what deployment is like. And then some readers might well think, "But she says she doesn't write with a message in mind. Yeah, right." I get that. But that's not how the book came about, and it's not why I wrote it. More...