I’ve added a publications page to the blog. Just a list of stories I’ve sold so far. It was fun putting this together, a nice year-end what-happened-in-2008 survey. And I’m thinking about doing the inverse — compiling a list all of the year’s non-accomplishments: all the stories that were abandoned, or rejected, or left unfinished; [...]
In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose’s lively and lovely ode to the written word, there’s an entire chapter devoted to the awesomeness of Anton Chekhov. I haven’t read anything by Chekhov myself, but, as soon as I saw this quote, I immediately wanted to: It is time for writers to admit that nothing in [...]
I want desperately to tell everyone what am amazing, mind-blowing, harrowing, beautiful book The Road is, but I don’t have the words. And, honestly, I don’t think there are words — anything I say about it would fall so short of capturing the experience of actually reading the thing that it would amount to a [...]
I’m incredibly happy to report that my story, How I Got Here, has just been published in the latest issue of Weird Tales. I wrote it at Clarion, in the bowels of UCSD’s wonderfully strange Geisel Library, in three days. Usually it takes me weeks to pound these guys out, so this one was a [...]
So it took me about twenty years to figure out something pretty fundamental about writing characters. I just finished a story about this kid, his father (who thinks he’s a god) and his mother (a depressed alcoholic). When I first started writing it, the story focused almost exclusively on the boy and his dad; the [...]
Just ran across a review of a book called Starbucked, which describes the mechanisms of Starbucks’ unlikely success. There’s a lot of focus-grouping involved in creating the Starbucks “experience”, apparently, and it grows out of a culture of new-age cookie-cutterism and aggressive homogeneity-breeding. This has the reviewer feeling a bit dyspeptic: There is something ironic [...]
Argus the Fractal Ant, that craggy anchorite, uttered only twelve worlds in his whole life, all of them in the instant before his death. “I have never known a man,” said he, “more jackrabbit than ravine cold cuts.” And jabbed defiant antennae at an unfeeling sky, and gurgled, and died. There were three in attendance [...]
For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is [...]
My understanding of symbolism was dealt a near mortal blow in high school, when we were given an edition of The Old Man and the Sea with a symbol index in the back. A symbol index is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of story artifacts, with accompanying capsule descriptions of what each [...]
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