A peek outside at my compost tumblers

Behold the my favorite compost tumblers! Believe it or not, this is the view I can get if I stick my head out the window by my desk to admire my compost. That’s how much I love them.
You see, I’ve been through the tedium of forking over a compost bin full of leaves and weeds. [...]

Modern Library Writer’s Workshop

For some reason, most of the writing books I like seem to be written by genre writers. Nancy Kress. Stephen King. Walter Mosley. Orson Scott Card. They still emphasize narrative. I just don’t buy the idea that modern literature has moved beyond narrative and we should be impressed with character studies and slice-of-life depiction and [...]

The Limits of Enchantment

It’s time to admit that there are several books I like that I’m not going to be able to do justice to, and waiting to post about them won’t make it any better. For example, The Limits of Enchantment, by Graham Joyce is exactly the sort of book that I never would have bothered with [...]

Happy Turkey Day

I’ve written enough turkeys for a while. It’s a lot safer to just cook turkey today. And if you’re reading this on Thanksgiving, go eat your turkey. Shoo!
In the meantime, what am I thankful for?

Hard Frost

Daylight Savings Time ended, the juncos showed up, and now we’ve had a week of hard frosts overnight and mostly twenty-degree days. I guess it’s time to admit winter has started. There was even a white rime on the ground this morning, but no way was I going outside to get a picture.
You’ll have to [...]

More Pratchett, some witches

I actually read Equal Rites far more recently than I first read the next two “witch books” by Terry Pratchett, so all I knew was that I liked them. Even on rereading Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad, the moment I put them down I can’t remember one bit of the story, or which book or [...]

A peek into my worm bin

Icky Worm Girl speaking. This is my Worm Factory, which I’ve maintained for just about a year and a month. It has five trays with mesh bottoms. You bury food scraps under the bedding on top, and as the trays fill, the worms migrate to the upper trays. After a couple months, the bottom tray [...]

Save the Cat!

It’s funny that a recent comment mentions movies and TV as a source for your scifi and fantasy fix, as I am interested in screenplays. In fact, some of the more emphatic statements about storytelling are found in screenwriting books. For example, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, which I first heard about on The [...]

Anathem

If you read cosmology books for fun, you’ll have plenty of fun reading Anathem, by Neil Stephenson. It also helps if you like wordplay, language, and philosophy. I liked this book so much I was actually a bit relieved that I didn’t fall in love with it, because a 900 page book could mean some [...]

Beginnings are hard

I think I’m making a bit of headway with that beginning that’s giving me so much trouble, but I’ve had a couple of those days where you look at the screen in utter despair because it’s boring and no one will get past that first page and nothing you’ve done has fixed it and there’s [...]