This week on Starship Sofa, Ton’y featuring not only an interview with me, but also a podcast version of my story “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic” (originally published in the Shine Anthology) It has a little more than the original published story had — a little metastory for the podcast version. You can check it out here, along with interviews of Larry Santoro and Robert Silverberg, and the story “For The Lover of Mechanical Minds” by Brenda Cooper. (It’s also, incidentally, my own podcast debut as I play a sleazy salesman in one of the advertisements… I’m not sure …
Tag: WRITING
The Danger of A Single Story
It’s been a busy day and I have miles more to go before I sleep… miles of grading to do, that is. Tomorrow, I’ll be making an attempt at sauerkraut, inspired by The Mad Fermentationist’s attempt (making, bottling), but for today, I’ll be digging into student work. Thursday night is the session of the Presentation Contest that I and a colleague will be judging, but tomorrow I’m off. More grading, some mazering (yes indeedy, that means meadmaking) and sauerkraut-making, and a trivia contest with some friends. Might as well get as much fun in as I can prior to the …
Days Flying By…
Today was a busy day during which I didn’t get much done, which is odd since I have a lot to do this week. On Saturday, Miss Jiwaku and I joined Chris, a member of the crit group to which I now belong, at the 2010iSF film festival, where we saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aelita: The Revolt of the Robots in the morning. We were starving, so we left after that, but missed a screening of Metropolis with a live pianist playing the accompanying music, and The Forbidden Planet in the evening. On Sunday, we had crit group, …
Machine of Death anthology hits #1 at Amazon
I mentioned my story “Improperly Prepared Blowfish” was included in the Machine of Death anthology. It was one of the first stories I ever sold, and the book is now out. In fact, yesterday the book was #1 on Amazon, because of “a clever bit of internet marketing that urged people to buy the book on October 26th.” That makes the book, a book in which one of my stories is included, a #1 Bestseller, folks. Wow. No thanks to me, obviously, since I was busy and behind on email and forgot to post about the Oct. 26th scheme — …
Seoul SF Crit Group
I forgot to mention this, but looks like we have ourselves a “speculative fiction” (SF and fantasy and horror, I guess?) critique group in Seoul. This is something I’ve been wanting to set up for years, but I never knew enough people in the area who were writing. (I did have a frustrating brush with a local open mic night–groan–but the thing is that with crit groups, you kind of need the people critting to be familiar with the genre you’re writing. Otherwise, you’re in the same position as asking a fan of Mozart to give you pointers on your …
Saisons: Belgian Beer and Global Warming
Homebrewing has bloomed again to the level of an obsession. I have a couple of books coming my way which elucidate the secrets of the Belgians–Stan Hieronymous’s book on Trappist Monk brewing, and another on Farmhouse Ales. But something dawned on me quite a while ago, which I recently worked into the plot synopsis for a novel I am hoping to write soon. One (small) part of the book has to do with Belgian brewing and how global warming will affect it. You see, Belgian brewing is, more than many other sorts of brewing, quite closely linked to the landscape. …
Bad Luck Comes in From Tampa…
It turns out jbrandt was right. The Mountain Goats… very much my thing, and inspiring in a writing-wise sense: Also, tangentially, for some reason, this is the song I imagine Kenneth from 30 Rock starting his shows with when he starts going out and singing in smoky bars and clubs after he becomes fallen in New York City, takes to deep atheism and hard drink and crazy women, and then exiles himself to some shack in the depths of New Mexico for a few years till he can wean himself off nanodrugs and sexbots, and then finds the only thing …
Robogeisha Taken? Okay, Well…
Finally, a writing project post! I’ve had some time to get some work done on a few projects, and the ones I’ve gotten to have been coming along nicely… but I’ve also decided to tie up as many loose ends as possible (in terms of shorter writing projects) so that I can dedicate myself to writing a novel after this semester. Anyway, I dug up an old sketch of a short story which, in the form it was originally conceived, was of very limited potential: likely mostly to succeed as a kind of in-joke for Ubuntu Linux users, involving the …
Reading Street
If you’re curious about what happened with that textbook series I was working on last year, for which I wrote the reading-text narratives for a series of English textbooks for Korean elementary schoolkids, focused on English reading and writing skills, this post is for you.
The Fleeting, Fragile Spirit of these Creatures Clinging to this Rock
I have a story in my mind, about time travel and moral yearnings and hope and the complete annihilation of everything you hold dear. It feels like this song: … and I don’t know if I can write it so it comes out that way. But it’s a good song, isn’t it? And yeah, I first heard it on Weeds, and couldn’t get it out of my head then.