Most of this blog is about writing, so most of the posts will be categorized, ‘Writing’. You can select this if you don’t care about anything that’s not writing.
I think it’s reasonably clear that The Flintstones doesn’t take place in the past, it’s actually far-future bio-engineering science fiction. They’ve got resurrected dinosaurs with lots of genetic tinkering to make them useful as cars and garbage disposals, engineered to understand commands (and, inadvertently, to make smart-alec remarks). Thanks to advanced climate engineering, they can […]
According to Duotrope, I just hit a new milestone: 50 short story submissions! That’s 11 short stories written, completed, and submitted at least once in the last two years. I had at least one submission a month for the last year. Five stories are currently out on submission. All but eight of those submissions were […]
One of the things I like most about the Writer Lifestyle is just how accepted it is to spend a great deal of time doing research just for the sheer hell of it. (The rest of your time should be spent writing, naturally) Lately I’ve been reading up on WWI-era submarines and trying to brush […]
Early on after I started writing again, I joined an online critique group, Critters. I got a lot of good feedback from it, but only one critique was so good that I still remember it more than a year later. It was from a pro writer who correctly pointed out that the story wasn’t really […]
OK, this isn’t writing-related, but it’s important. I really can’t believe people haven’t connected the dots on this one before now. Surely it is obvious that Big Bird is a velociraptor, right? Look: it’s been a few years now since the discovery that they have feathers. And surely you’ve noticed the way that on Sesame […]
I had wanted to put up a thread earlier for my story The Body and the Bomb, published back in April by Crossed Genres, but I don’t think that page is the appropriate place for me to put my thoughts about the story — I don’t entirely subscribe to the “death of the author” or […]
Just a quick note that I’ll be headed to Readercon in Burlington, MA this weekend. I’ll be in and out but otherwise around from Thursday through Saturday. I’m not scheduled for any events myself, but I know a number of people who are, so I’ll be busy. (I have it on good authority that the […]
Just about every writer has heard the advice, “Kill your darlings” (and if you haven’t, you just did). The advice has come to have an almost mythic quality to it. Hell, someone even titled a movie about a writer after it. The “kill your darlings” formulation apparently comes from Faulkner (who graciously specified that this […]
Distillation of spirits is a wonderful process in which one starts with an alcoholic liquid and proceeds to remove as much of the water as possible in order to concentrate the alcohol and flavors. This is made possible by the fact that different liquids have different boiling and freezing points. The simplest method for doing […]
I finally finished that freaking novelette I’ve been working on, and realized that I’ve done very little writing other than that. Now, this is mostly because I’ve been really busy — the kitchen renovations are on the last lap, we’re doing the preparations now for the last step, countertops. But that’s not the whole answer. […]
John P. Murphy 