Do you remember the story your Uncle Wen told us before we went to get our tattoos? How Dragon, the water spirit, and Phoenix, the fire spirit, met and fell in love? How they became so enraptured with each other that they shirked all responsibility, seeking only to be in each other’s company? But without the dragon, the waters did not run and the rain … Continue reading The Dragon and the Phoenix
I need to be better at handling them. I don’t even take my own advice and end up making things worse. It’s just so damned hard. To be clear, pedantry is not disagreement — although any disagreement automatically opens a lot of ground for pedantry. Someone is not being pedantic simply because they have a different opinion or are making a contrary argument. The point … Continue reading Pedants are Assholes
In the early 2000s, I took a second job teaching Biology on nights at weekends at the local community college. Teaching Biology means teaching evolution, because nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was then I realized just how awful science education is in this country — how we spend 95% of class time on atomic facts, treating science like … Continue reading The Shocking Truth
There’s a joke in financial planning circles that if you ask a number of people about their plans are for retirement, some percentage will say something like “I’m gonna win the lottery.” The joke of course is that you’re far more likely to die in a car accident this year than you are to win the lottery. Ever. Winning the lottery is not a sound … Continue reading On Publicity in Publishing
I’ve been to the UK several times. I saw Bath and Stonehenge. I got drunk in Canterbury and pissed on a wall. I took the Night Scotsman from King’s Cross to Edinburgh where I had a delicious haggis in the brick-lined basement of a very old building. And on one trip I was just down the street from an IRA bomb in — guess where … Continue reading An American in Scotland
I ran across pictures of this while doing research for settings for my novels. Both fascinating and heartbreaking. Oceangoing vessels are not meant to be taken apart. They’re designed to withstand extreme forces in some of the planet’s most difficult environments, and they’re often constructed with toxic materials, such as asbestos and lead. When ships are scrapped in the developed world, the process is more … Continue reading The Shipbreakers
A couple times now I’ve been asked how I handle it, most recently yesterday. This is my answer. I don’t think there’s a thing called Writer’s Block. What we call Writer’s Block is a collection of many different psychological faults and phenomena, some real, some imagined, so don’t fall for it. In my experience, there’s a big problem and a little problem hidden in there. The … Continue reading Writer’s Block
