WIP Excerpts

Mpepper/ March 29, 2025/ Writing/ 0 comments

I’m writing again, hopping from project to project, but I think this is finally the one I’m going to focus on. It’s set in AElit (see the tab above for context) and the working title is The Lost God. Below are excerpts I posted on Bluesky for various prompts. They’re not in any particular order in terms of the chronology

Read More

Everybody’s Bored

Mpepper/ March 28, 2025/ Reviews/ 0 comments

Our family loves John Mulaney’s comedy. We quote him regularly, and middle child actually does a pretty solid impersonation. We’ve seen him live. And we got a real kick out of the week-long Everybody’s in L.A. series on Netflix. A lot of people did—so many that Netflix returned to that well and created a weekly live talk show in the

Read More

C + C = C

Mpepper/ March 21, 2025/ Think Pieces/ 0 comments

Behaviors are bad all over. They have been for a while, but they seem to be getting worse (or I’m turning into one of those cranky old people with no tolerance for tomfoolery, which is just as likely). Movie cinema owners and operators bemoan that fewer people are going to see movies on the big screen, but they do nothing

Read More

Places

Mpepper/ March 19, 2025/ Think Pieces/ 0 comments

We recently passed our “Caliversary,” which is the anniversary of the day we put our family on a plane in Massachusetts, flew across the country, and transplanted ourselves in California. I had lived in Massachusetts for over 12 years (12 years, 7 months, and 4 days to be precise), but I’ve now lived in California longer than that, which got

Read More

Don’t Waste Your Empathy

Mpepper/ March 14, 2025/ Think Pieces

Leopards are feasting on faces right now. Social media is rife with posts about Trump supporters who have found themselves hoisted by their own petards. Some go so far as to post pleas directly to their clay idol to have him undo the specific harm that they have been caused. “Please hire my wife back!” “Please don’t deport my son-in-law!”

Read More

Five Years Later

Mpepper/ March 12, 2025/ Flashbacks

Five years ago, right around this time, the world began to fold in on itself like origami. I’ve seen a lot of people posting their memories about it, so I thought I’d add mine. At the end of February and start of March 2020, my husband and I drove down to Disneyland for a long weekend to enjoy the Food

Read More

Why America “Can’t” Have Tuition-Free College

Mpepper/ March 11, 2025/ Think Pieces

Yes, “can’t” in quotation marks because, of course, we could have education without charging ridiculous amounts of money for access to it, but… I have one child at university and two more in high school, so wouldn’t I just love it if the United States offered tuition-free options for higher education? You betcha. Germany is often pointed to as the

Read More

Breaking Point

Mpepper/ February 27, 2025/ Flashbacks, Writing

Four years ago today, I received the email that broke me. I know the agent did not intend to ruin my life, but the stress fractures had already formed after years of writing and querying and getting close but never quite landing where I wanted to be. The email read: You have written a solid manuscript that was a delight

Read More

I Need a Lift

Mpepper/ February 26, 2025/ Think Pieces, Writing

You’re on a road trip. You don’t know the exact destination, but you trust you’ll know it when you see it. In the meantime, you do have some thoughts about the kind of place you’d like to end up. Maybe you want to be near water. Or you want a hot, dry climate. Maybe you’re set on someplace urban. Alternatively,

Read More

Sleepover Movies

Mpepper/ February 22, 2025/ Flashbacks

I grew up in the 1980s, and there were three movies that were key to any sleepover when I was a kid: You needed at least two of these for a sleepover to be a success. But if Blockbuster (or that one grocery aisle that had movies you could rent) didn’t have them, there were acceptable alternatives: (I realize Clue

Read More