Category: Miscellaneous
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LunaCon 2014, Featuring ME!
If you're going to be near Westchester County, New York this weekend, please consider stopping by the Hilton Westchester hotel in Rye Brook for Lunacon, New York's venerable science fiction convention. I'll be there, and here's my schedule: Friday, March 14, 5pm: Alternate Technologies in Historical Fiction — I'll be moderating a panel as we discuss…
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A Darkling Sea — The Musical!
Despite having written a guest blog post about who I'd like to see in a movie version of A Darkling Sea, I'm pretty certain that it's one book which will never be filmed. As I pointed out in the blog post, it's about the most unfilmable novel ever written. Most of it takes place in…
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How To Authorify, Part 3
February 2014 was a revelation to me. Up until A Darkling Sea came out, I still had the quaint belief that the author's job was to write stuff and the publishers took care of selling it. I forgot that one of the most effective selling tools in the publisher's kit is the author. During February…
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Lovecraftian Interlude
Recently I've been re-reading H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for the umpty-ninth time. It's one of my favorite stories, and like many great stories one keeps finding new bits in it. This time around I noticed something subtle, so subtle I can't make up my mind if Lovecraft meant it deliberately or not.…
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A New Blog
The United Nations Interstellar Cooperation Agency has a new blog devoted to their Ilmatar interstellar mission. Check it out here. There's also a link to a site with some cool HENRI KERLEREC merchandise.
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The Lost Age of Romance
What do James Bond, Don Quixote, and steampunk fiction have in common? I was talking with one of my kids about Don Quixote, and something struck me. In Cervantes's novel, the elderly Quixote is a Spanish gentleman whose wits become addled from reading too many romances of chivalry. He begins to think of himself as…
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Winter’s Tales
Winter has arrived. One can go by the calendar, using either December 1 as the start of the "winter months," or use the Winter Solstice. The latter is beloved of radio disk jockeys and talk show hosts, who love to announce on December 22 that "this is the official beginning of winter" and mock those…
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Thumbs Up
The first reviews for A Darkling Sea are starting to trickle in, and Kirkus Reviews has a very favorable one. It's very gratifying to see that other people enjoy what I've written. I hope everyone else likes it as much. Up to the point at which the publisher accepted my final draft, Darkling Sea was…
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Administrative Note
I've had to switch over to moderated comments because of the astonishing volume of gibberish spam lately. If you post a brilliant comment or clever riposte and don't see it right away, that just means I have to approve it.
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Leveraging Our Desires
My kids have recently become enamored of the TV show Leverage, watching it via Hulu and Netflix. If you're not familiar with the series, it's basically an updated Mission: Impossible. Each episode centers on an elaborate caper performed by our slightly shady heroes, typically aimed at righting some wrong. To make the episodes interesting, the…
The Cambias Digression 