Archive for June, 2006
Plumbing the Genealogy Pool
By David Niall Wilson
“Those who hope to read about family greatness and fortune can stop reading right here. The only thing illustrious about our family is a long tradition of being ordinary folk - mostly good, loving, substantial people through whom God=s purpose here on earth has been and is being fulfilled.”
Laun C. Smith, [...]
Vincent’s Mirror
By
Richard Steinberg
“Eddie was truth. He more preferred living without rules than living with them, liked women, enjoyed (but was not particularly skilled at) physical sex, was frightened of emotional sex, wanted to be in control while seldom accomplishing the feat, and blindly attacked anything he feared. Henry was the lie, the façade adopted [...]
Shortcuts to Oblivion
This one goes out to all you writers of scary stories who are just dying to get that inside track to publication. I seem to have run into an awful lot of you lately. Or perhaps I should say my inbox runneth over.
(Wicked laughter goes here.)
Okay. You’ve sweated and bled and created your monsterpiece, and [...]
The Ghost in the Tower
By Chet Williamson
Having accepted the invitation to join my fellow writers in this blog, I thought it might be illuminating (at least for myself) to try and determine what it is about writing that makes us keep doing it, that makes us push on, boats against the current, kicking against the pricks, continuing to write [...]
Do I Know You?
Today, I got to meet one of the voices in my head.
Perhaps I should explain. I’m currently in Los Angeles for a voiceshoot for one of the video games I’ve written for. What this entailsis roughly a week spent in the studio, tweaking dialogue and providingcontext for line readings, and occasionally commenting that a lineneeded [...]
Tools
by Janet Berliner
You want to talk unreasonable? It’s unreasonable to expect me to follow Stan’s debut. Why is my life so h-a-r-d?
As some of you already know, I recently spent two months sans computer. The bad part was that not writing turns me into a roaring witch; the good part was that, [...]
A Reasonable Proposition
I began to doubt science not too long ago. Can’t put my finger on just when.
That may seem paradoxical for a sometime practitioner of the social scientific method.
As an adjunct faculty member in a reasonably prominent business school, I have used the social scientific method of inquiry (although not as rigorously as some of my [...]
The Naming of Names
by Jeffrey Thomas
Okay, you’re sitting there writing your novel, going full steam ahead, the action unfolding smoothly, and your police detective protagonist lets himself into the coroner’s office to have a look at the latest victim’s weirdly mutilated corpse. You’re brought up short. Not with concern over how to describe the body or fashion the [...]
Other Worlds Part 3: Deus ex hominum (the god in the human)
…A writer is God to the people in a story, he made them up just like God made us up…- Annie Wilkes, from Stephen King’s Misery
I refuse to prove that I exist, because proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.- God, From Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Before reading this essay, I [...]
Hope Does Not Spring Eternal
By
Richard Steinberg
“It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause,” Henry Ward Beecher
I know too much about defeat.
Not the defeat [...]
