Writing « Jennifer de Guzman

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

She also writes "Life in Comics," a monthly column for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, and collaborates on "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," a comics column on Robot 6, with her husband, artist Brian Belew.

Portrait by Brian Belew.

I Write Like…

There’s nothing like an Internet meme to distract the writer from writing! This time it’s “I write like,” which analyzes an excerpt of your writing and tells you whom you write like. I tried a few excerpts.

An “interlude” chapter (these are chapters that take place between the main action of the novel — they’re set before [...]

They Say You Were Something in Those Formative Years

"Not quite Sophie Beer" by Dan Foy, www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/, used under Creative Commons License

Via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I found “Bad Books for Kids,” an essay on young adult fiction by David Mills, first published in Touchstone, a Christian magazine. Mills expresses his shock at what he calls “commercial depravity” in literature for [...]

New Life in Comics

My new Life in Comics Column is up at Publishers Weekly. It’s about how women and girls are treated in the comics community.

When I turned it in, I was a little concerned that I had struck too strident a tone and was being too harsh or unfair. But then I read the comments on this interview [...]

Auto Draft

At The New Yorker, Laura Miller reviews The Hunger Games, a series of young adult novels set in a society in which teenagers are annually drafted to take part in a gladiator-like contest. But more broadly, Miller explores the genre of dystopian fiction and its appeal to teenagers. She attributes it partially to teenagers’ ability to [...]

The Value of an English Degree

Lately I have been thinking about what my English degrees have done for me, not so much in their specifics but in regards to the skills I acquired while studying literature. Then this morning I heard the story “Aspiring Writer Questions Value of English Degree” on the radio. The subject of the story, Heather Lefebvre, says [...]