writing

“Diamond Sharks” now on Moozvine

My short science fiction story Diamond Sharks is now available from Moozvine, in all current e-book formats as well as online. And the e-book versions come with the gorgeous cover art by Gil Rodrigo! Get it now, it’s free (except any amount you may feel inclined to give to support both Moozvine and this struggling […]

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Upping The Ante

A hundred words a day was too easy. Raising the challenge to 150 helped some, but I was still building a huge buffer that enabled me to skip days and still stay ahead on Beeminder. Retro-ratcheting the buffer (raising the target line to trim the buffer to zero) helped only for a brief time. Let’s […]

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The Art of Being Good

De Nederlandstalige versie van dit bericht is te vinden op mijn Nederlandstalige site. Is it even possible to be good at art? Last year, I spent a very enjoyable week in a hotel on the beach, attending Bureau Zuidema‘s Personal Influence Program course. To balance out the emotionally harrowing, self-confronting content of the course as […]

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Minding The Bees

A little over three months days ago, I decided it was time to stop procrastinating, and begin making writing a regular part of my life, a given, a habit not easily broken, like sleeping, eating, reading, and bodily functions not normally mentioned in polite company. My approach was to demand of myself that I write […]

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It Was Tenty Years Ago Today

Has it been a decade* already? The calendar says it has. The 19th of August, 2005, in the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, Washington, I had the honor of receiving the Writers of the Future Award from none other than Frederick Pohl and Jerry Pournelle. Since most of the good things that happened in my […]

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Non-Puppy Nominees Sweep The Hugos

With the winners of the 2014 Hugo Awards announced, we can finally see how the Puppies affected not just the ballot, but the final votes. It looks like either the works that were not on the Puppies slates were of a consistently higher quality, or that the Hugo voters decided en masse to mostly ignore Sad […]

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My Hugo Votes

In voting for the 2014 Hugo Awards, I set out to apply my Modified SPUNARPU method. As I began reading/looking/listening, I soon found that my sanity required me to amend my rules slightly. Here, then, is my method, with the amendments to my rules added in bold. Slush-peruse (read, watch, listen until I’ve had enough) all nominated […]

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The Tyranny Of Dontellia

An evil dictator has taken over the realm of writing critique. She has held sway for years now, if not decennia, and has cowed writers both green and experienced into near-blind obedience. Her dogma has become the staple of writing feedback, to such an extent that reviewers fear to leave out her central tenet: Show, […]

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The 2014 Hugo Ballot

The icons  and  indicate nominees who were on those respective slates. Please realize that this does not necessarily correlate with anything, including quality of the work, Hugo-worthiness, willingness to be put on the slate in the first place, or even political leanings. 60% of nominees were on the Sad Puppies slate, 67% on the Rabid Puppies […]

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Back To The Future – Of The Hugos

Sometimes, life suddenly makes sense. Earlier this week, I mentioned a blog post by Sad Puppies 3 instigator Brad Torgersen, in which he waxes eloquently about tribalism as the socio-psychological mechanism behind a lot of what we call other -isms (racism, sexism etc). I perceived a fallacy in his use of this well-worded and convincing […]

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