So, there are a number of readers who object to profanity or obscenity or other “bad words”. Can’t say I’m one of them. And while I do sometimes think that popular culture has gotten a bit coarse, I don’t hold the position that I ought to have a personally-sanitized version of it. I do have […]
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 […]
This will be a short one, I think. In the broader subject of rhetoric, there are five canons, one of which is the systematic search for argument, the Inventio. The subject of stasis, which I discussed last time, comes out of the Inventio. So does the subject of ethos, which I’ll talk about today. These two […]
How appropriate that I have a crick in my neck! 2010 is the year I got serious about writing: No more fiddling around writing (just) for my friends, no more getting one rejection and sulking for months. All together, I figure I wrote about 50,000 words of fiction this year. I didn’t sell a damn thing, but […]
No, I don’t want bad SF. I want good SF — but about economics, the “dismal science.” As part of my side hobby of world-building, I’ve been collecting SF-oriented papers by economics like Paul Krugman and Robin Hanson. Hanson’s page (linked left) is a great starting point. There are some fantastic ideas there. But what […]
“There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.” — S.S. Van Dine, “Twenty […]
Two rejections in one day. That’s a bad thing, but also a good thing.
John P. Murphy 