Re: Bullet In The Brain

Normally, I’m not all that interested in literary fiction. Most of what I’ve seen feels more like stuff you’re supposed to like, not stories you can like. The worse cases are go down like medicine that tastes so bad, you know it must be good for you. But on rare occasions, I’m surprised by a […]

Brasyl – Take Two

Finally! It took me two weeks, in fits and starts, to read Brasyl, and then another two weeks to digest it. I have to admit, for a while I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. But I couldn’t invoke the 150 page rule because I liked the first 150 pages. In fact, I […]

The 150 Page Rule

Somehow we get it into our head that if we pick up a book to read for pleasure, we have a moral obligation to finish it. That’s ridiculous. For starters, if a published book doesn’t grab you on the first page, don’t take it home. If that seems too draconian, you can also invoke the […]

The Great Bee Hunt

Here are some of the first pictures I took with that camera I was so excited about Friday. I was almost as excited to see my peonies weather a few days of rain without all the petals falling off. Too bad there’s no room for bees to get into them. That’s okay. I’ve got other […]

Re: In the Company of Crows and Ravens

If you’re interested in corvids or the intelligence in birds, you’ll enjoy In the Company of Crows and Ravens, by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell. You can hear them discuss the book and more stories in a pair of interviews on KUOW. In the first one, Tony Angell does some amazing crow calls, and […]

Small successes

I’m sorry my posts this week have been mind-alteringly dull. There will be more about SF reading next week, honest. I finished Brasyl, but I’m still digesting it. I discovered that I still like my favorite Nancy Kress story. And even though I’ve been playing with a new camera all day, I managed to start […]

Persistence

What’s the saying? Fall down 12 times, get up 13. Sometimes it feels more like fall down 30, get up 31. I’m thinking of this because I found one of my old calendars that I used to log when I got writing done. It looks like back in 1999, I wrote every day for a […]

Remember to write

That was a big success. Not.

Just Start Writing

I have been writing every day, but it hasn’t felt all that productive, as I thrash about, trying to get my current story off the ground. Aside from that, I’ve fallen into a pattern that I’m trying break out of. I keep putting off writing until late in the evening. (And yes, it’s 9 pm […]

June

First a warning: if I start skipping days, it’s going to happen this month. I will keep up with posting about non-fiction books on Saturdays, and my garden on Sundays, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen on weekdays.