Category: WRITING

On the Lovecraftian Mode

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A while back, I found myself in a kind of Lovecraftian mode. I was writing specifically stories that sort of merged my own version of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands setting with his Cthulhu stories, the stuff set in a world like ours, but with a horrifying alien-god conspiracy hidden in its shadows. I’ve long felt like this would be an interesting synthesis, something Lovecraft might have gotten around to himself if he’d lived longer–and there are hints of it, here and there, in the Dreamlands stories–but which is, nonetheless, very much my own take on things. My crit group at the time …

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Sawing Off the Brakes

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The other day, I saw this xkcd webcomic someplace: I was reminded of it when, going through some old posts and tidying up some messed-up Youtube embed code (from a plugin long dead and gone), I saw a little manifesto I wrote about culture, art, and creativity, “Pearls Before Swine, Or, The Time Has Come To Saw Off The Brakes”:

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Linkspray

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A spray of links and goodies. I’ve been saving up. The Shining: Since watching Room 237: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHE5YUNkssQ … and then rewatching The Shining, I’ve been a little fascinated with the film, and a lot fascinated with others’ (often slightly-to-very-crazy) fascination with it: Staircases to Nowhere: a documentary on the making of the film, with interviews of the crew: The Overlook Hotel is a tumblr dedicated to ephemera from the film’s production/promotion/etc. STANLEY KUBRICK’S MASTERPIECE, “THE SHINING”: Basically a book-length reading of the film in the form of a blog, which I have yet to read though I’ve read fascinating reviews. Apparently this …

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Cowboys in Space: A Mixed Metaphor

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I’ve always wondered why people were so fascinated by stories of cowboys in space. For me, it’s always been a non-starter. Granted, maybe I’d like these stories better if I liked the characters and writing better, but the widespread for Firefly kind of baffles me, though of course we could chalk it up to different tastes with the writing, or my lack of fannish devotion to Joss Whedon. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to think in terms of why things do or don’t appeal to me… to figure out my own tastes, as it were. After all, I’ve liked very few …

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One Coin, Two Sides: An Addendum

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By the way, in case it sounds like I was only talking about other people in yesterday’s post, I wasn’t. Even in the specific subject of writing for kids, I’m as guilty as anyone, though of course I end up crusading against the madness of Kitty Farmer, and in league with the likes of Ms. Pomeroy: Here’s some proof: A couple of years ago I collaborated with a colleague of mine (Haeyoung Kim) on a series of educational books titled Reading Street. (I posted about the books when they first came out, here.) One of the artists who contributed to the …

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One Coin, Two Sides: Children’s Literature and Censorship

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So, I’ve been working with a Korean writer who is trying to branch out into writing kid’s books in English, and to writing fiction. So far, she’s mainly written nonfiction stuff–educational books–but now that she’s in Saigon, she feels like she has the time and freedom to branch out into fiction. It’s been pretty interesting to go through the basics with her, week after week, because so much of what’s true of kid’s fiction is true of all fiction. Characters, motivations, story problems… they’re all there. Kidlit is sometimes a little more directly allegorical, and sometimes is a little more …

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Jazz Spoken Here (Incoherently)

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Last night I dreamed I was playing in a transtemporal big band, on tenor sax. Next to me, Duke Ellington, on… trombone. (He said he took it up for the challenge, because he already knew everything he was ever gonna know about the piano. “… and the trombone’s humble.”) We were in Korea, playing a gig in Seoul sometime in the ‘oughts (we were time travelers, remember?), and I was asked to speak about my time in the country. I was honest, talking about the good and the bad, which didn’t seem to entertain the audience much; when I looked …

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Learning Curves, Apparent and Hidden

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Back when I was a music student, it wasn’t all that unusual for people–especially students–not to have a computer at home. That’s what computer labs were for, so, yeah, my first few years of internet-use all took  place in campus computer labs. Campus computer labs tended to have only the sort of software everyone needed, so while the music notation software Finale has been around for ages, I never really learned to use it properly: the only computer I knew that had it installed was a tiny little Mac Classic in the “electronic music lab”–a tiny, windowless room mostly taken …

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A Serving of Links

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A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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