I am one of the 944 writers who voluntarily participated in a survey Neil Clarke (editor of Clarkesworld) is in the process of taking. He won’t release the full information for another week or so (which I can’t wait to see), but a few days back he gave some demographic numbers. These are spare bits, […]

I went to lunch with a “new” writer last week. She’s very good but, being new, she’s still feeling her way around (which makes her just like everyone else, but we won’t tell her that now, will we? We’ll just let her figure out we’re all pretty much clueless on her own. Believe me, it’s […]

Lately I’ve taken to watching videos during lunch. Interviews of people I think are interesting, or other things I think I want to learn about. Today, I stumbled upon an HBO thing titled “Talking Funny,” which has Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis CK sitting around and talking about how they view comedy […]

Why, yes, I was listening to David Bowie this afternoon. Why do you ask? If you’re a regular reader of this place, it should be pretty obvious that I’m in the process of revamping the place a bit. This is going to be moderately routine thing for the next few days, I would think. So, […]

As with most everything I have to say about art and writing, this is a long and meandering piece. I think it means something though. I think it gets somewhere. We shall see. I am going to use pretentious words like “art” and “artist” and other such muck-a-muck. If you are one of those TLDR […]

As synchronicity would have it, I ran into two different bits today that have to do with cultural snobbery and the genres. The first is a blog entry by Mike Dunn, who is an aspiring writer who was literally chased from his love of Analog by the culture of friends he hung around. The second […]

“I’ve never thought of writing as being artistic.” I’m paraphrasing a little, but that was a friend of mine said during a conversation we were having a couple weeks ago. He’s a moderately new writer, meaning he’s been working on it for a while, but still has tons o’ questions and tons o’ worries and […]

A little while back Roberta Laurie interviewed me for On Spec magazine, which is the really rocking Canadian small press that published my short story “Operation Hercules.” It’s a great publiciation. I suggest you read it. She asked me who some of my favorite authors are, and I started with Robert J. Sawyer. I think […]

As I’ve noted in the past every now and again, I listen to a lot of podcasts during the afternoons when I walk, or work out, or go to the grocery, or do whatever non-writing thing I do to break from the creative/productive side of the day. I used to listen to a lot of […]