Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
I’m a true genius at marketing.
I’m on my way to a book signing at Kinokuniya Books, Siam Paragon Centre. It’s 2.35pm, and I have to be there at 3pm. And I’ve just remembered I have a blog, and what a good opportunity to add this item, and everything. And I’m sure many other people will now rush into the street, as I plan to, and hail a motorcycle taxi to take me to a BTS station so I can … Read more
I see I haven’t posted an item since 17 March. Excuses range from “I’ve been too busy to blog” and “I’m suffering a multi-tasking deficiency” to “I’ve sustained a fit of sanity, wherein I see no percentage in posting elaborate messages into the Void.”
Mostly, though, I’ve been in thrall to a fiction project, a series of speculative novels. The Muse, revealing herself as a dominatrix this time around, has shacked up with me big time. (I speak only figuratively, … Read more
Well, maybe just a few.
A writer should find a good chair, e.g. Install it right there in front of computer, pencil & pad, whatever, and then sit in it for extended periods, writing stuff.
Here’s a real lode of good advice from The Guardian—10 rules for writing fiction from each of a bunch of prominent writers.
And here are five tips of my own, something I recently added to advice emerging from a Clarion Science Fiction and … Read more
Come meet the authors (seven of them, at least).
Bangkok Noir
Book launch, open to the public
8pm: FCCT (Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand)
Maneeya Building, Penthouse Floor; enter the building from the Chidlom BTS Station, southwest exit.
Official book launch
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT)
8.00pm, 17 March 2011
Book signing
Kinokuniya, Siam Paragon Branch
3.00pm–6.00pm, 2 April 2011
For more information, please visit www.bangkoknoir.info.… Read more
In the old days, writers sharpened pencils, checked the mail, experimented with melismatic renditions of “I’m a Lumberjack, and I’m Okay,” polished the piano (the rich writers, I mean) and so on. Classic avoidance behavior, right? Anything’s better than actually getting down to the hard business of writing.
Maybe not. Or at least maybe not entirely. I’m not the first to suggest that all the screwing around may well be a vital part of the creative process. … Read more
“Does this mean you’re going to live to be 125?” my Sara asks. Her voice remains carefully neutral, non-accusatory.
The good news: All I need to do is drop a few kilos, I’m told, and I’ll have an overall fitness age somewhere in my mid-20s with personal training in Los Angeles. (“Fitness age,” I have to imagine, refers to something like “health-span,” which is enjoying some currency among transhumanists and their ilk. More on that in a later post.)… Read more
Jack here.
The fever’s gone. I’m still sick, though. Never mind I’m sitting here like a fool—more like a two-bit hooker, actually—editing a massive, near-sadistically impenetrable document for money, not enough of it.
But let me tell you about my blissful, antihistamine-enhanced sleep last night. A serial dream—it bridged multiple pee breaks—had me much excited at a book idea. I’d decided the combination of the world’s longest palindrome (several long paragraphs) and a brand-new concept of time I’d come up … Read more
Leary here. Wherever that might be (not to mention when).
Current affairs written on the wind (“mere ephemera,” according to my editor, which I didn’t ask). Right now, many of you folk back in 2011 will be fretting about political events in Egypt. The papers should be full of it. (You could still read newspapers back then, and they were often full of it.) No doubt the TV networks will be talking it up like they discovered Egypt only last … Read more
From the man who brought you The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein–his latest comic blockbuster:
Reality!
Reality keeps changing. Before passing on the latest hard evidence for that proposition, however, let me tell you how I first tumbled to this interesting fact.
Authorities progressively less authoritative. Remember when you were a kid? Back when you believed your parents knew everything, and could always be relied on to give you the straight goods? That was back in a time … Read more
I recently saw Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas doing a job of personifying greed for the first time since the first Wall Street, which won relatively more favorable critical notice, came out in 1987.
Critical opinion on Rotten Tomatoes seems about evenly divided. But I tend to be a-critical when I’m in the mood for escapism, and I reckon this film did the trick very nicely. I’d recommend it for fans and enemies … Read more