August 6, 2019
This is not a complaint about Netflix in general (well, not necessarily, but anyway). Without Netflix, I might have gone, shall we say, a little…
…this past winter. I’ve been working temporarily in Montréal, several thousands miles of miles apart from my family, and being able to watch movies and older TV shows has been a great escape from the depressing monotony of single life.
But I feel the need to tell Netflix that I do not appreciate their use of the word “original.” Continue Reading
November 18, 2018
Hi, everyone. I know it’s been a while since I blogged here. But I have been writing.
And editing. And then writing again. And, yes, in multiple genres. That’s my philosophy. That’s what you get if you read my writing.
I think I’ve probably written about this before, but I find myself increasingly disliking current writing styles. Short paragraphs. Bad grammar. No internal monologue. Things blowing up. Continue Reading
October 16, 2018
Since I don’t have access to a printer for a while (on a research stay in Montréal for a while), I decided to write a letter.
You know, on paper. With lines. That stuff made from trees that you can still find everywhere although nobody under the age of 25 ever uses it any more.
I hadn’t written an actual handwritten letter since probably before 1995. It felt…oddly satisfying.
Of course, I rambled on for 12 pages before I realized it. But imagine that; imagine no email, no tweets and posts and shares, and actually writing a letter that *only one other person will ever see.* (My mother in the hospital, in case you’re wondering.)
Can kids these days even conceive of such a thing, let alone actually write one?
Just think: You who are born into the digital age, you will never know the frustration of constantly confusing “stationary” with “stationery.”
‘Cause, what’s “stationery” again?
Oh, yeah. That stuff made from trees.
Old fossil. Jeez, get back to writing about SF already. (Getting there, getting there. Family comes first. Gimme a break.)
April 22, 2018
On a lark, I signed up for a “BrandYourself” account a few weeks ago.
I’d read about it via a Quartz link and was curious. I’ve been living outside the US Culture Bubble for about two decades now, so I’ve largely missed the “OMG my employer is checking my SNS posts” terror that (apparently) has been sweeping the nation.
My first BrandYourself warning: You have 738 Risk Factors!
OMG. What were they? Was I really putting myself at risk? Continue Reading
February 11, 2018
So much for my New Year’s resolution of writing more regularly on my blog.
I can blame “writer’s block,” which is sometimes just a convenient excuse for general laziness and sometimes stems from a genuine fear of being entirely uncreative and uninnovative.
(My software program tells me that uninnovative is not a real word. Well, now it is. So there.) Continue Reading
April 19, 2017
When I first started writing the kernel of what ultimately became Adam’s Stepsons, the multiple/mixed genre story The General in His Labyrinth had just been published, by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I’d been searching for character names, desperate not to have them all sounding like the people I knew at the time (i.e., white guys in my rural hometown).
So “Marquez” sounded like a great name. I had a general in the story. General Marquez fit. Why not. Continue Reading
March 29, 2016
I’ve been meaning to add a personal essay page to my web site for stories that didn’t seem to fit into any neat categories. The immediate impetus is an essay that was recently “rejected” by my former graduate program’s in-house literary journal…probably because it’s an essay and not a short story (I posted elsewhere an article about the quirkiness of the English-speaking world’s insistence on an artificial separation of “fiction” and “nonfiction”).
Rather than wait up to half a year to see whether I could get it published online in a magazine (most of which seem to only publish US-centric, “woe is me” or “OMG look at THIS” sensationalist drivel) I thought that at least I could share it here…
The essay is “En” (縁), a topic that Asians (particularly those in Confucian-influenced societies) know a lot about. I first encountered the concept as a teaching assistant in Gojo High School, Nara, about 15 years ago. Almost like a previous life. Maybe it was…
Check it out here.
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