2008 Hugo Winners Announced

The Hugo winners have been announced, and I’m stunned that 3 out of 4 of my favorites won. Evidently there was a massive attack of good taste. (By which I mean, they agree with me.) But that’s not why I’m happy.

Re: Get Everything Done

I can’t help it if I’m a sucker for books with titles that make big promises. And the bigger the promise, the more skeptical you need to be. I was willing to believe in Get Everything Done, when Mark Forster confesses to being a procrastinator. I was won over by the insight he shows into […]

Re: Edward Bear and The Very Long Walk

I seem to be encountering a lot of bears lately. A couple friends of mine are working on stories about bears. I am discovering that I like stories by Elizabeth Bear. And recently I heard a delightful reading on Escape Pod of “Edward Bear and The Very Long Walk,” by Ken Scholes. It begins when […]

Am I Writing A Lot?

I devoured How To Write A Lot at the end of June, and decided to try out its advice for the month of July. The book advises you to schedule your writing at a regular hour, commit to that hour, and defend it–even against your own bad habits. So did it help?

The sunflower is dead, long live the sunflower

Already that huge sunflower has gone from a feast for bees to a feast for goldfinches.

Re: The Something-Dreaming Game

The first third of “The Something-Dreaming Game,” by Elizabeth Bear is utterly frank about how young people seek unusual sensations, enough that I can see why some people might be uncomfortable listening to it on Escape Pod. The narrator’s daughter, Tara, developed RSD, after breaking her arm. She gets an implant that keeps the searing […]

Re: Accelerando

I’m about to insert one large grain of salt into the 150 page rule. (Ouch.) The rule sounds generalized, but the results are individualized. There are books I can’t finish that you may love. Take Accelerando, by Charles Stross. Please.

Mystery Grape

See those vines? I’m used to watching my step when I climb past them. I’m used to hearing bees buzzing my ears. Lately, there’s bees under those leaves, and it’s a little unnerving to have them buzzing around my feet.

Re: Feathered Dragons

A change of pace from my usual light reading, Feathered Dragons, edited by Philip J. Currie and others, is a collection of papers about the transition from dinosaurs to birds. After an introduction by Robert T. Bakker, the first section is a broad overview. In the second section are several studies of fossils and tracks, […]

Capturing ideas

Where do ideas come from? There’s all sorts of answers to that question, or refusals to answer, but it’s really pretty simple. For example, in the podcast Writing Excuses, the first episode makes some interesting observations about when ideas come to you and how to capture them.