Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t read fiction. Not that they don’t usually read fiction, or haven’t read fiction in a while, or don’t enjoy reading fiction. They don’t, as a matter of principle, read it at all. Nonfiction is ok, because nonfiction has facts, and you can use facts to improve yourself. [...]
The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which applicants compete to write the worst first sentence of novel: For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she [...]
I’m trying to write a bio for a short story I’ve got coming up, and am having the usual terrible time figuring out what to say. Here are some options: Lapsed Cannibal splits his time between working on his perpetual stillness machine and looking for the end of Pi — where, he is given to [...]
I’m thrilled to say that I have a story in the latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s called Epidapheles and the Insufficiently Affectionate Ocelot, and it recounts the adventures of the decrepit wizard Epidapheles and his familiar, an invisible sentient chair named Door, in their quest to save a kingdom whose regent has [...]
Mark Pilgram dishes out some sage advice: I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in [...]
Sakura Park is a beautiful, hopeful, heartbreaking poem from Rachel Wetzsteon, who died recently, and too soon.
This passage, from Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, just blew me away: When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Years, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going in their minds. He’d decided that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no [...]
I’ve got an essay about Edgar Allan Poe, called Leaky Graves, in the latest issue of Weird Tales: It’s part of the magazine’s Growing Up Poe feature, in which a bunch of us write about what Poe meant to us when we were kids. Here’s Cherie Priest’s excellent contribution.
From a BoingBoing post about über-crank Ignatius L. Donnelly, who Charlie Pierce profiles in his book Idiot America: “Cranks are noble,” Pierce says, “because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.” It’s like the difference between kitsch and dreck–people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck [...]
From Kater’s World Fantasy Convention diary: The SF community runs on love, not money, and we sometimes forget how much of themselves so many people have to give to keep everything going. I’ve never heard it said better.
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