I’m going to have Barry Manilow in my head all. Damn. Day. Er, anyway. This is a linkspam post. As you’ve no doubt noted from the many, many sites that have chosen to “go dark” today (in some cases only for US browsers), there’s a little bit of a protest going on, over extremely harmful [...]
Category Archive for ‘WTF World?’ 
The desperate quest for a new TV fantasy
I’m one of those people who’s perpetually behind the pop-cultural cutting edge. In fact I pretty much lurk at the blunt ass-end of what’s new/hot/now; I discover TV series years after they’ve been cancelled, I catch up on the popular movies only when I find them in the bargain bin, I’m years out of date [...]
A Writer’s Education
Apologies in advance; not gonna talk about writing for the moment. Instead I’m going to talk about the writing life, in a way. See, I took the GRE on Saturday. I did OK. Astounding on the verbal and abysmal on the quantitative, as I expected. I’ve been using my verbal skills steadily and with increasing [...]
Where it comes from
I get asked a lot how I concocted the worldbuilding of the Inheritance Trilogy — the politics, that is, as much as the mythos. People ask me how on earth I came up with a society in which the law is whatever the hell the people in charge decide to enforce, for whomever they deem [...]
Welcome, folks from Blastr
Please mind your manners and wipe your feet before coming in. Everyone else: sorry, but a couple of people (or one determined person with a lot of time on his hands) have not minded their manners re my last post. Apropos of which, the blog is on moderation — if you’ve commented here before successfully, [...]
Go#$%!$ Hollywood!
YOU CAN’T DO THAT. YOU CAN’T TELL A NUANCED, COMPLEX, INTERESTING STORY ABOUT BIGOTRY AND USE BIGOTRY TO DO IT. YOU WILL SHOOT YOUR OWN MESSAGE IN THE FOOT AND RUIN AN OTHERWISE EXCELLENT MOVIE. DOES THIS NOT OCCUR TO YOU? ARE YOU INCAPABLE OF THINKING FOR TWO MINUTES DURING THE SCRIPTWRITING? DO YOU JUST [...]
An anecdote
Been sort of vaguely following the whole kerfuffle over that dumbass article on fantasy over at the NY Times. (I mean “dumbass” in the most respectful way.) I’m not particularly upset about it because ignorant bigotry rarely upsets me; it’s the bigotry of the supposedly knowledgeable that I find more dangerous. And this is bigotry, [...]
Dear Hollywood: How’s That Bigotry Working Out for You?
Dear Hollywood: I get it. Those of you who control the purse-strings: You say you’re only interested in the color green, but your behavior doesn’t bear that out. I know you’re really only interested in stories of straight white men doing straight white mannish things, whatever those might be. I get that the voices of [...]
Missing Voices
What should science fiction sound like? Or fantasy. A short story of mine, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters”, was published in the UK anthology Postscripts a few months back. I’ve sold the audio rights to Podcastle, which is going to run the story sometime soon — and I’m [...]
Is there a Rule of Three in SFF?
Somebody in my Twitter feed linked this today, which I’d never seen before. Some insightful commentary from the late Dwayne McDuffie, a kickass comic book writer and trailblazer within that genre, talking about the Rule of Three. No, not this one; something else: Which got me thinking, of course. I’ve said before that most of [...]
