Posted on December 2, 2019
Opening Day
It’s 123 days until opening day for the Washington Nationals. This is important to me and about a million other people, but not at all to anyone else. I played Pop Warner football growing up and spent the… Read More
Posted on October 13, 2019
Why don’t they…
This is a tiny collection of logic holes in science fiction. Now, this is for my personal amusement only. In most cases these holes don’t ruin anything. They’re just fun to think about after the fact. So why… Read More
Posted on August 12, 2019
Bad Tactics
I served in the military, but I am not a military man. I’ve never read any books on military tactics and would say I only have the glancing acquaintance with the famous strategies of, say, Agincourt, Little Big… Read More
Posted on August 3, 2019
Arriving Late Podcast Ep 23: Nerve
Episode 22 suffered complications from a technical glitch and had to go live on a farm upstate where it can spend all of its times admiring rainbows. Ep 23, however, is here and covers a far more important… Read More
Posted on July 21, 2019
Horror vs Fantasy Redux
I’ve written before about the key differences between horror and adventure (a term I use to include all the flavors of fantasy that are not horror), specifically here: horror-vs-adventure Now I have a reason to talk about this… Read More
Posted on July 14, 2019
Finding Your Voice
Everyone starts the same way, I think, by imitating their favorite authors. I was a Heinlein clone, then a knockoff Hemingway, for a while I was a poor Vonnegut. No matter who you are impressed with or how… Read More
Posted on March 21, 2019
Isolation & Rescue
Stephen King said in On Writing that he believed most writers spent some part of their childhood physically isolated in a way that books became their whole world for a time. I don’t know if that’s true about… Read More
Posted on February 19, 2019
Master Class: Lesson 5
“And then what happened?” Lesson 5 was about story and plot, about “what happens next?” that most elemental of questions. I’m quite good at plotting – this class is tailored more toward beginning writers – but I did… Read More
Posted on February 13, 2019
Master Class: Lesson 4
Lesson 4 was about voice. Every writer goes through the process of finding his own voice by failing to mimic his favorite famous authors. Eventually, the mistakes become your voice because those are the parts that can’t help… Read More