We Write!
There's the brilliant scene in Alice in Wonderland where she is falling, ever so gently, into Wonderland via a rabbit's hole. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling... Continue Reading →
"Help, I need sources!" Ah, the plea of the desperate student/grad-student/fiction writer in search of material or confirmation of some nugget, or a replacement for something that suddenly won't work any more. Every so often the question arises about how to do research. Fair warning, I do/did this for a living for a while, and... Continue Reading →
Over this summer, in between the unavoidable interruptions of Real Life, I had begun to wonder if I was really going to write this book or if I would simply spend the rest of my life taking notes about Renaissance Italy and the Turkey of Mehmed II. Then things began to fall into place. The... Continue Reading →
"This is an instrument that has been asleep for almost 2,000 years, but all you have to do to awaken an instrument is to have an idea. Musical instruments are to express human ideas. Therefore, the reconstruction of a musical instrument is in a class utterly different to the reconstruction of any other archeological object.... Continue Reading →
The First Reader recently complained about Oakley Hall’s La Adelita because, he said, the author “stole” an episode from John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico. Isn’t Reed’s book non-fiction? I asked. Yes, but… Did Hall copy Reed’s wording? No, but it was the same sequence of events, and he wrote it as if it was happening to... Continue Reading →
I've thought, more than once, about story ideation as feeding the sausage grinder. I've made sausage many times over the years. I can remember making caribou sausage in Alaska, and making sure we ground bacon into it, because otherwise there's just not enough fat. And when you make your own sausage, you know what's in... Continue Reading →
I'm tired. How tired am I? Well, I had a moment yesterday where I didn't look closely enough as I wrote and scheduled a post and I have put my planned MGC post up on my blog. In my defense, the backend of wordpress sites looks remarkably similar. However! I will extrapolate out of my... Continue Reading →
I'll admit right off the bat, this post was inspired by the title of a post over on The Passive Voice. But it veers off the path immediately from the Publishers Weekly article that was the basis for the PV post. If I try to write about "cultural appropriation" this morning, the post would wind... Continue Reading →
I’ve reached a point in the current book (#7 in the Applied Topology series, for those who care) where I have to stop, take a deep breath, sit back and… read all day. Or maybe all week. No, really. I have to. I’m not just making excuses to take off, I swear! (Oy… please, people,... Continue Reading →
For those registered U.S. voters, today is the day for mid-term elections. That means our media (mainstream, social, alternative, etc) is filled with all things politics. If you wade through it all, sifting through the piles of excrement, you might find a glimmer of truth somewhere. "Might" being the operative word. For those who dislike... Continue Reading →
Mad Genius Club 