What does that mean? I’m not quite sure, but Lime said it was something like what I took to mean “Joyful Melding” or something like that. It’s the title that was given to the translation of the article I wrote in English about the Jeonju Sori Festival, which was published in this month’s 문화저저늘 (Culture Journal). Since I didn’t title it myself, the title can only be credited to the translator… Lime says the writing as rendered in Korean is absolutely beautiful, and of course I’m not sure whether that means my writing is good, or whether to credit only …
Category: WRITING
Laying It All Out On the Table
It’s nothing new or anything, but it just kind of hit me again when I was reading about Dickens’ style of representation. One of his critics—perhaps it was even Henry James—complained that his style of characterization was very caricaturesque; that everything was out on the table from the first moment you met a character, none of that subtle revelation of his or her secret nature piece by piece. I found that interesting because I noticed something lately, which is that people actually do sometimes lay things out on the table from the get-go. At least, they seem to do it, …
Grab Bag
Okay, well, straight from the title of this post: Good News: I have started a new novel, and it’s not my SF-jail novel (which I think I’ll work on, off-and-on, for a while, but which isn’t my main focus now): it’s a kind of a futuristic espionage thing, but with several interesting (I think) twists. So far I’ve mapped out some of the background, and I have a pretty good handle on at least two of the main characters. One of the main struggles for me will be to maintain neutrality when faced with the two vying organizations envisioned in …
ESL Teaching and Ultraviolent Fantasy Life: An Interview With Richard Morgan
Richard Morgan is an SF writer who works with extremely violent plotlines and vicious, tough characters. But when I listened to this interview with him that I learned something very interesting about him: he used to be an ESL (EFL) teacher in Britain. In fact, he attributes the extreme violence in his writing to his work as an ESL teacher. He talks about the kind of necessarily suppressed rage that one feels when one is confronted with bigotry, celebration of evil crap like Hitler and the Holocaust, and all kinds of other disturbing things that, well, frankly, are all too …
My Korean Drama
Just a couple of posts ago I bragged about the Korean play I wrote, and which the teachers performed at camp the other day. Well, for those interested, here is the file. And I’ve written more about the play and how/why it was put together, over at the collective Let’s Learn Korean blog. UPDATE, 4th January 2006: I have fixed some of the typos and other mistakes caught by my co-worker Kathy, and so with great happiness I present the newly updated version of Nolbu and Heungbu and the Legened of the Magic Tractor.
Instead of Pinochets
Well, some of you might recall a Friday 5 post I made a while back, which led to some comments among which Mike made a suggestion for a short story. I told him: If I so write it up and sell it, I owe you some beer. Well, Mike, I don’t suggest holding your breath quite yet, but I do think I’m almost done with the first part of that if-then statement. (Selling’s always the harder part, innit?) Even though I’ve been trying to catch up on New Sophists’ stuff, and to read Kat’s manuscript, I’ve been traveling, which means …
How little things come to one…
I don’t know why, but lines for writing often come to me in the shower. I don’t sing, I think about characters and how they might speak. Here’s today’s little absurdity: “Goddamn it, man! I feel like a hematologist practicing in a bloody Seventh-Day-Adventist’s Colony! town full of Jehhova’s Witnesses! Note sure I can use that, but ah well… EDIT: Saturday, 6 November 2004: Ooops on the wrong denomination. Thanks to Kangmi on the correction, though on the point about “colonies”, being an SF writer I can say (with the freedom of artistic license) that everyone has colonies in one …
Refuge: A Didactic Story
Last week my sister asked me to write a story to use at her work. She works for an NGO called the Mennonite Central Committee, which works at international development and is quite respected. The program she’s working in now is really very interesting. It’s called the In Exile, For a While Refugee Simulation Program. They take young people out on refugee experience simulations, complete with exploding landmines, starvation diets, nasty border guards, and long forced marches in awful weather, to give them a better idea of how to imagine a refugee’s experience: take this one awful day and imagine …