ONCE UPON A TIME, BEFORE minorities realized they were being patronized by pop-cultural stereotypes, there was a literary MacGuffin known as a “tar-baby.” This item featured highly in the Joel Chandler Harris story “Br’er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby,” where one…
Tag: craft
The “writing” part of Writing.
First Graf: Goldfinger
IF YOU HAVE NEVER READ the original James Bond stories by Ian Fleming, you don’t know James Bond. You also don’t know sweeping prose that zips along like a rocket; lush description with a reporter’s eye for detail; fourth-wall breaking…
Who Is This Prosatio Silban, And What Does He Want?
IT ALL STARTED IN 2005, when I decided to write fantasy tales. Or maybe 1995, when I was bored with the between-task tedium of printer’s work. (Of course, it really started in 1977, because that was the year I discovered…
Pithyism #888
INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS ABOUT ART’S ROLE in shaping cultures and individuals have to recognize the difference between censorship (an external restraint based on fear and loathing) and self-control (an internal restraint arising from the artist’s desire to communicate).
NextWave SF: “Retropunk”
FIRST CAME CYBERPUNK. THEN STEAMPUNK. And by 2021, … RETROPUNK. Shiny robots. Gleaming atom-powered spaceships. Martian canal races. Alien arcologies in the jungles of Venus. Male pronouns. All the glory of a big exploitable universe sans angst or post-apocalypse modernism.…
Dorothy Parker Nailed It
(From the should-be-better-known blog Letters of Note, here’s a desperate telegram dispatched by a wall-stuck author to her (apparently, or at least in Ms. Parker’s mind) neck-breathing editor. Between this and the previous post my own writer’s block should be…
And Now, A “Word To Bring Back”
PERFORCE. – Definition: “1 (obsolete) by physical coercion 2 by force of circumstances.” – Used in a sentence: “As the VCR is currently recording Deep Space Nine, we must perforce view Firefly on DVD.” – Why: Because sometimes, “really really…
I Am a Religious Man Unthreatened By Science, Secularity And Reason
(IN FACT, THE WHOLE “REASON” I “am” “religious” in the first place is only due to a direct perception [some might say delusion] that the Universe is, in some essential and indescribable sense, alive and conscious. I can’t help seeing…
Words Mean Stuff
A SHORT LIST OF WORDS which, through overuse, have been consigned to the meaning-deficient self-parody heap: Blatant Flagrant Offen(sive/ded) Rabid Sexist Racist Controversy Security Freedom Democracy Republican Terrorism Diva (There are others, but these are what I found in this…
How To Make Your Blog Sound Important
1. BEGIN EVERY PARAGRAPH WITH “I.” 2. Repost the same story as other blogs within your target demographic. 3. When commenting in other blogs, slip in the phrase “as I wrote” and flash your URL. 4. Call everyone by their…
Harlan’s Secret
“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in…
Question of Essence
DO YOU PRACTICE AN ART form, or a life form?