2011 has been an exciting year for me as a writer. I had my first fiction sale, my first podcast sale, and went to my first convention (Boskone). I won a Codex contest, and did respectably well in another. I signed my first autographs, at Readercon. I bought way too many fountain pens. In terms […]
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 […]
Hello! I hope you all have been enjoying the Argument posts. I’m getting a new batch ready, which will take some time, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to get some feedback. Uhh… what do you think? 🙂 I hope I’ve made plain that I’m not an expert on this subject: this […]
(If you missed the previous parts, you can start here. Go on, I’ll wait for you. ETA: This post actually stands on its own quite well. Feel free to read this one first then go back, I think you won’t be confused.) This is a long one, but I think important. There are two large […]
In my previous post on argument, I talked about what I saw as one basic division in story arguments. I suggested that there were two basic kinds of arguments being made in fiction: where there is a point being put forward, and where the story is being used to explore multiple sides of an argument […]
I recently finished David Zarefsky’s audio course on argumentation and reasoning. (Yes, I buy things out of mail-order catalogs. Leave me alone.) In that course he went into great detail in explaining how arguments work, what kinds of arguments we come across, how they succeed and fail. Many of these aspects of making and responding to […]
(Update: I’ve posted more on this subject here) In my professional life, I deal with metrics on a regular basis. Computer and network security in particular is (in my opinion) struggling with the transition from a qualitative to quantitative field. And hey, at heart I’m a quant: I find it easier to improve aspects of […]
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 […]
John P. Murphy 