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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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Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 2
Science Fictional Worlds I'd Like to Live In This turned out to be a much more difficult list than the previous one. The reason is pretty simple: settings that are interesting to read about are often horrible places to actually live in. I don't actually want to share my neighborhood with alien conquerers, reality-devouring cosmic…
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Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 1
I've been working on revisions for Star HERO lately, and my editor, the brilliant Steve Long, asked me to contribute lists of my favorite SF films, short stories, and novels for the bibliography. As I made up my lists it struck me that a lot of stories take place in settings which aren't very good…
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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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Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 5
The End of the Story But Not the Book After getting away from the Gargoyles, our heroes have a curiously un-exciting encounter with a room full of dragons. You'd think that a cave containing an unspecified number of dragons — even baby ones — would be a tough level for the player-characters to get through.…
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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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Moby Blogging: The Plot Arrives
In Chapter 36 of Moby Dick, the slow start ends abruptly when Ahab finally makes up his mind to go ahead and let everyone know how awesomely crazy he really is. He calls the crew together on the deck to hear one of the greatest insane rants in literature. Ahab begins by nailing a Spanish…
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Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 4
Elemental Trouble From the Valley of Voe our heroes climb another long staircase up to the land of the Gargoyles. Along the way they have a couple of odd encounters. The first is when they pass a rift in the wall which looks out over another cavern, and a very strange place it is. The…
The Cambias Digression
Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.
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