Well, I got my rewrite of “Lester Young” finalized today, and sent off. I also finished my first (well, actually, second attempted) draft of my Sado Seja story, “Eight Days,” about the eight days Prince Sado spent dying in a rice chest, and how he ended up in one in the first place. Someone asked me whether it was SF, and I replied that it’s more of a dark fantasy/horror thing. Historical dark-fantasy/horror, set in a Korean palace. But definitely there’s magic: you got your reincarnation, a magic Taoist text, a bit of necromantic assassination (not in Sado’s life, in …
Month: November 2007
On Derrick Jensen
Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy. My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I …
Bathed in the Light at the End of the Tunnel
The editing gig I’ve been working for a month or so is now, finally, thank the stars and the heavens, over. While I’m thankful for the filthy lucre, working on two textbook projects at the same time and mostly close to the deadline, during an already-busy semester, while keeping up my writing (somewhat, because I had deadlines of my own to keep), pushed me very close to my limits as a human being. Last week was relatively free, but the couple of weeks before, and the last few days, have been so crammed that I felt as if I were …
Great Progress
I’ve made great progress on a few things: Textbook editing is almost at an end! A few more hours of hell and it’s all over! Whew! “Lester Young…” is now essentially rewritten. I need a good hour to proofread it and then I can send it off! (I’m reworking it for a major magazine. More news when I have something final to announce.) A great deal of “Eight Days” fell into place in the last couple of days. Chunks of it just sort of bubbled up out of my subconscious, and insisted on being written. I also made a couple …
Media Accountability
For those who like to rant about the Korean media and its promulgation of bogus urban myths and the like, US papers (and presumably Canadian ones) are not above reproach. (PDF there, just warning you.) It seems that suicide rates actually don’t go up in the US around the holidays: Newspapers are close to putting to rest the myth that the holidays increase the risk of suicide. A new study shows a dramatic drop in articles that – despite having no basis in fact – attribute the arrival of the holiday season with an uptick in suicides. An analysis of …