July — Go figure

I seem to have settled into a groove. If I could make it through Readercon without missing a day of posting, I think I can keep up this blog. Still, I couldn’t have done it with a scheduled post in reserve. And I wouldn’t have wanted to do it without those nudges of feedback I […]

Squash Blossoms

Meanwhile, Mystery Squash #1 continues to take over its corner of the known world. It’s clambering over those daylilies on the right and powering up the slope toward Mystery Squash #2. There’s at least half a dozen more Mystery Squashes scattered out back. And they’re flowering.

Re: I Bought A Little City

Another delightful story from the New Yorker Fiction podcast is “I Bought A Little City,” by Donald Barthelme. Donald Antrim has just the right accent for a story about a man who buys Galveston, Texas. As the narrator strolls about, enjoying his new purchase, he thinks, What a nice little city! It suits me fine. […]

Re: Lunar Park

One of the books that helped me establish my 150 page rule was Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. And that despite an enjoyable first chapter / preface. In a oh-look-metafiction way, the opening purports to recount, in first person, Bret’s carreer up to the great splash of American Psycho . Now, I don’t know […]

Sunflowers are feeding bees

Presenting the big-ass sunflower that was just a tall weed that I hoped was a sunflower about a month ago. If you look close enough, you might see the bee on its face. And what’s the bee here for?

Re: The Case For Mars

I have mixed feelings about The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin. The second half is full of reasonable-looking ideas for using the resources available on the nearest terrestrial planet to build a liveable place. But the first half is a hard slog through the self-congratulation about how brilliant he was for coming up with […]

Re: Unique Visitors

I’ve encountered “Unique Visitors,” by James Patrick Kelly four times now, and each time I’ve had a different reaction.

Podcasts Of Mars

The Readercon panel that had me taking lots of notes was “Podcasts Of Mars.” They threw out a huge list of podcasts worth listening to, and gave pointers for creating your own podcasts.

Weedercon

I love Readercon, but it’s still too many people, too many ideas, too much information in too little space. No wonder it doesn’t take long for me to go into buffer overflow. What? A writer who needs a little alone time? Never heard of such a thing. This year it was even hotter than usual […]

On-line fiction

Readercon has been over for a couple days, and I’m just starting to recover. One panel that got me stirred up was “The Aesthetics of Online Magazines,” which left me feeling very depressed about the future of the web as a means of delivering fiction as text.