– Definition: “1 chiefly British : a large heavy truck 2 : a massive inexorable force, campaign, movement, or object that crushes whatever is in its path” – Used in a sentence: “My sister’s new baby is a juggernaut of…
Tag: creating
Making stuff: up, real, and nicely.
Equationary Simples
METAL = ROCKS + FIRE / SLAG. WRITING = WORDS x TIME / TALENT. LOVE = PEOPLE – EGO x ACTION. COOKING = INGREDIENTS + TASTE x EXPERIENCE. TEACHING = THOUGHT1 + THOUGHT2 x EXPERTISE / TOPIC. FILM = IMAGES…
Storyteller’s Knot
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF any story is the point at which it’s attached to the reader.
PR Haiku
OUR NEW MOTTO IS: “All That’s News To Me, I Print.” (New York Times-inspired.)
Who Is This Prosatio Silban, And What Does He Want?
IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA’S DIABLO VALLEY c. 1978, Dungeons & Dragons was barely known outside the fantasy-and-science-fiction community. I first learned of it around that time via David Hargrave‘s Arduin: a created world not unlike J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, C.S. Lewis’…
When The Troll Sweats, Bottle It
IN THE STARS MY DESTINATION, Alfred Bester imagines a world peopled (in part) by a cast-off group of future savages who chant scientific formulae during their religious rituals. “Quant Suff!” they chant, in abbreviated imitation of “sufficient quantity.” “Quant Suff!”…
The Color Of Metaphor
WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT (in addition to these words) is, according to thecolorof.com‘s rendering engine (still in beta!), the color of “metaphor.” (The color of “metaphorager” is, alas, invisible to normal eyes.) The website evidently layers keyworded images into…
Am “I” The Only One?
IN THIS ELECTRONIC ME-FIRST age, it is both rare and a point of honor never to begin a blog post with “I.” (Nitpickery note: I mean the word and concept, not the letter. Yeesh.) Not that I’m not tempted —…
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…