Category: Writing
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 5
Friday began with a lecture by Mike Brotherton about galaxies. He began with a little history, about William Herschel's attempt to determine the Sun's position within the Milky Way galaxy by counting the stars in different portions of the sky. This gave a decent rough approximation of the shape, but vastly underestimated the size and…
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Genre and Plot
Diane and I went to see Super 8 this past Friday, as one of our mostly-weekly date nights. She was really excited about it — I was less so, but only because I've been cruelly disappointed by movies too many times in the past decade. (Capsule review: The Goonies Meet Cloverfield. Four out of five…
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Soaps Vs. Self-Contained Episodes
I recently joined Brian Rogers and Tom Ladegard to playtest the character creation system for the Smallville roleplaying game. It was an interesting experience. Smallville (the game) is of course based on the TV series Smallville, about the teen years of one Clark Kent and his pals in a small Kansas town, including the angsty…
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Gibberish
Submitted for your approval: The Postmodernism Generator. It generates a new postmodernist critical essay. Compare with the real-life postmodernist critical writings. This is the primary reason I have no interest in pursuing an advanced degree in either of the subjects I love — literature or history. I can't make myself write in the accepted academic…
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How I Did It #6: The Ocean of the Blind
"The Ocean of the Blind" is a long story about a group of scientists in a station on the bottom of the ice-covered sea of a moon called Ilmatar, in a distant star system. They mean well but get into trouble. The main character is Rob Freeman, a young technician who gets recruited by the…
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Random Thoughts on Horror
Recently I was casting about for something to write next, and it struck me that I've never written a horror story. Some of my work has elements of horror — I wrote a Hellboy story about a vampire — but usually my goal is something other than scaring the reader. (The Hellboy story was a…
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Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 3
Un-Player-Character-Like Behavior The Black Pit isn't actually a pit, it's more of a tunnel. The Mangaboos wall our heroes into it with glass boulders, so Dorothy, Zeb, Jim, Eureka and the Wizard follow the tunnel to see where it leads. They go up for a long way and finally emerge in a "delightful valley" with…
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More Moby Blogging
My son and I have gotten up to about Chapter 35 of Moby Dick; he's still interested, although Melville's language sometimes mystifies him completely. I had forgotten how much of a slice-of-life realistic novel Moby Dick is. We remember Captain Ahab's mad quest and the high-school English essay allegories, but we forget how much of…
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Copyrights and Schadenfreude
Apologies for the long hiatus. Among other issues, we took a family vacation and my internet access was limited. Anyway, I'm back. Yesterday I happened to read a posting on the usually interesting io9 blog (the science fiction branch of the Gawker Media empire) — this one, about the tension between expansiveness and self-referentiality in…
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How I Did It #5: Apocrypha
I'm probably going to get into a lot of trouble for this one, but here goes. "Apocrypha" may be the weirdest story I've written. Rather than summarize it, I've posted it to a separate Web page here. Read and enjoy. Now that you've looked at it, you're probably thinking "What the hell was that?" That…
The Cambias Digression 