Funny, painful, accurate
Sep 28, 2004: This is kind of tedious to read, but that's the point: If all stories were written like science fiction stories goes into painful detail about all kinds of everyday activities in almost exactly the same way science-fiction does about the events it portrays. (It reads a lot like Heinlein or Niven to me, but maybe that just betrays my reading tastes.) If your science fiction reads like this, it's time to start rethinking things.

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On being creative
Aug 2, 2004: This is an ongoing thread on gapingvoid, the weblog by Hugh "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" Macleod, and, as you might guess, it's not about writing specifically, but is instead simply about how to be creative.

There are some really lovely, insightful ideas in here:

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please."

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Just a quickie
May 9, 2004: Here's a little something for people who think that National Novel Writing Month is for slackers: the Great Mahakali Write-A-Thalon, where participants finish their novel or screenplay within 58 hours, from 9:00AM May 14th to 7:00PM May 16th. Completely insane.

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Learn Writing with Uncle Jim
Feb 21, 2004: I haven't had a chance to finish reading this whole thread, but there's an excellent discussion going on at the Absolute Write Water Cooler: James D. Macdonald is talking about the art and craft of writing commercial novels.

"My mutant talent is to make my opinions sound like facts," he says, and I have to say, they sound like facts to me, too. Excellent stuff.   -- via Boing Boing

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Useful advice. Or perhaps not.
Feb 2, 2004: Sorry I've been so silent here of late -- I don't have Internet access at home any more. But in case anyone's still reading this, I just wanted to share a useful article.

But I couldn't find one, so instead, here's National Lampoon's How to Write Good. I wanted to go through and find a quote to post here, but really, I can't choose just part of it -- it's all amusing. Go see.

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A PKD Moment
Nov 29, 2003: WIRED has a pretty decent article up now about Hollywood's new fascination with the works of Phillip K. Dick. I find the article a little depressing -- okay, a lot depressing -- because of the gosh-wow enthusiasm with which it embraces the idea that an author's works are only properly valued once they're ground up like sausage and commodified -- but I just had to link it here for this great quote from one of PKD's essays:

"We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

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Beware of Wolfe?
Nov 4, 2003: So this morning, I was looking through the LiveJournals of people who read my journal, and found this post from Natalia Lincoln about getting a harsh criticism from Gene Wolfe at the Odyssey workshop. Her response to it at the time sounds calm and reasonable and professional to me, and the feelings she wrote about in her journal only human and understandable.

But in reading the comments on the post, as she's getting both support and abuse for her reactions, I notice that her post prompted a thread on MetaFilter, essentially calling her out as a poor sport.

Going a little deeper down the rabbit hole, I find it gets worse; Mr. Wolfe apparently left the Odyssey workshop early after receiving a letter telling him that many students found his critiquing personally offensive, and would not return to class until he'd left. He realized he'd "become a liability to the workshop, [and] promised to leave at once." Ouch.

(Nota bene: I don't have any reason to think Ms. Lincoln had anything to do with said letter, and neither should you. Note also that Mr. Wolfe specifically thanks her, along with three other students, for their support.)

There are a lot of interesting questions at work here; the quasi-private/quasi-public nature of LiveJournal not the least among them, and the nature and purpose of critiques and workshops in the first place. Nick Mamatas blames the Freemasons. No, really. Well, sort of.

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Searching for Permission?
Oct 26, 2003: So this past week, Amazon launched their remarkable new Search Inside the Book feature, which allows you to run a full-text search on over 120,000 books in their catalog. Aside from boggling over the technology involved, one of my first thoughts was, "Wow -- how did they clear all the copyrights?"

Well, it turns out they didn't. According to the Author's Guild, Amazon cleared the rights with the publishers -- but the publishers' contracts don't allow them to do so without the permission of the authors. Oooops.

Most people I see commenting on this seem to be to painting the Guild as foot-dragging luddites, and saying that this search capability can only benefit authors. I agree that it seems beneficial; but still, I think it's only proper to be asked before someone uses your property.

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Horror Reading
Oct 17, 2003: It's that time of year again! Come to my sixth annual Horror Fiction Reading on Saturday, November 1st -- the Day of the Dead!

I'll be reading several of my short stories, including the brand new piece I've mentioned working on.

As always, the Reading will be at the Aurafice, an Internet coffee shop, on 616 East Pine Street, between Belmont and Boylston on Capitol Hill in Seattle, WA. It will be from 7:00pm until 8:30pm. (Early enough, I hope, for everyone to come to the reading and still be able to go out and enjoy the rest of your Halloween weekend.)

If you're not familiar with my fiction, please check out my personal website at: http://bloodletters.com/

If you're planning on being there, then please consider posting this link image in your LiveJournal, or to your website or weblog. I look forward to seeing you all on the Day of the Dead. Thanks!

Here's the code for it:

<a href="http://www.bloodletters.com/"><img src="http://www.bloodletters.com/pub/reading2003.gif" border="0" width="300" height="300"></a>

Make room on your bookshelf
Oct 9, 2003: Listen, you need a dictionary, right? Sure, what writer doesn't? Well, assuming you don't have a spare $3,000 burning a hole in your pocket, I imagine you're not going to run out and buy the entire 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary any time soon. So why not enter this contest to win the complete OED, brought to you by the bestest bookstore in the world, Powell's Books?   -- via MemeMachineGo

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