O Fellow Connoisseurs of Mythic Fiction (and Gastronomy), please: Lend me your eyes. For many years now, I have been writing occasional fantasy tales about Prosatio Silban: a self-defrocked holyman turned mercenary cook in a far-off land containing a vast…
Tag: craft
The “writing” part of Writing.
5 Thoughts: The Third Thing
1. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT frustrates me as a writer is my own self-limitation. Specifically, I am speaking of the notoriously difficult and bothersome Third Thing. 2. The Third Thing works like this. I will write a sentence that…
Pithyism #69b
DO WE RESEMBLE OUR TOOLS, or do our tools resemble us? (I’m including in this equation notional tools like webspace, word-processing software, Facebook’s post-ranking choices, etc.)
Confessions of an Earnest High School Dropout
IT ENDED LIKE THIS: “MRS. J—–,” I said evenly, “you should work for the city sewer department instead of teaching English — because you know more about scat than you do about good writing.” Except I didn’t say “scat.” And…
“Let’s Go See!”
TO THE SMALL CATALOGUE OF meaningful three-word human phrases (“I love you,” “let me help,” “take your time,” “hold my beer”) should be added one pertaining to perhaps that oldest of motivations: “Let’s go see!” Mind you, this drive isn’t…
“NaSSWriMo!”
TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre…
It’s Really Spelled “Hallowe’en”
(TO BE CLEAR, IT’S ACTUALLY a slight abbreviation of the phrase “All Hallow’s Evening,” AKA “All Hallow’s Even,” AKA “Hallows E’en.”) There’s something to be said about archaic or alternate spellings / renderings. For example, a beloved English teacher once…
Why I Hate Jay Michaelson ;-)
IT’S THAT ANYTHING I CAN do, he can do better. It’s his unaffected, artless prose. It’s his vast non-dualist scholarship and experience. It’s his light touch. It’s his unpretentiousness. It’s that he neither talks down to or over the heads…
5 Thoughts: Informed Appreciation
1. IT’S ONE THING TO LIKE something. It’s something quite else to know why you like it — and how it came to be. 2. “Informed appreciation” is the key to that knowing. Only when you can comprehend the effort,…
“It’s Just That…”
THERE’S A THING — WELL, LET’S call it a verbal placeholder-prefix — used by writers of audiovisual entertainments when they want a character to segue away from or into an awkward conversation. My friends, meet: “It’s just that…” You’ve heard…
Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Sing Glad Songs to the Memory of Groovy English Teachers
WHEN MRS. BOISVERT TOLD ME in ninth-grade English class that I had the soul of a poet, I grimaced. “I want to be a scientist,” I said. She had no answer to that. But she had answers to lots of…
Why I Love: Robert Anton Wilson
IT’S THE WAY HE BLOWS my mind. It’s the way he mixes conviction with doubt. It’s his searingly funny prose. It’s his search for Ultimate Relativity. It’s that he taught me some important Latin phrases, like “Cui bono?” and “Non…