Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Posts Tagged Words

Publications

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; [...]


Chekhov and Motivation

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 [...]


The Road

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 [...]


Posted
17 August 2008 @ 8am

Tagged
Words

How I Got Here

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 [...]


Posted
14 July 2008 @ 6am

Tagged
Words

Writing Characters

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 [...]


Posted
30 June 2008 @ 8am

Tagged
Words

Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe

My story, Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe, just went up on Strange Horizons!


Posted
22 June 2008 @ 9am

Tagged
Words

Starbucked

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 [...]


Posted
14 May 2008 @ 8am

Tagged
Words

The Death of Argus Ant

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 [...]


A Passionate Plea for a New Pronoun

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 [...]


Symbolism

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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