I just finished reading Neil Gaiman's debut novel as sole author, Neverwhere, aloud to Dr. Wife. It was reverse-engineered from a telescript Gaiman wrote for a BBC television series; both series and novel came out in 1996 ( Read more... )

For Christmas this year the three members of my family who are actually on this continent all got new smartphones. We got Motorola RAZR M's, an Android-based phone, but we kept our service plan with Verizon Wireless. So far it seems OK, though I am very new to the whole smartphone thing and am having the familiar brain-damaged feeling that I get ( Read more... )

I read about two dozen webcomics regularly, but usually don't talk about them.

But my favorite, at the moment, is remarkable enough to deserve a plug. This is The Interstellar Tea House, which has been appearing right here on Livejournal at chaogaogongIt's a science fiction story; I would classify it, if forced, as "hard" SF because of the pains the writer/ ( Read more... )

Especially in the years when it was just gathering steam, Project Gutenberg would take digitized text from almost anywhere if there was the slightest argument to be made for it; relatedness to the Internet was one of the most commonly used arguments ( Read more... )

My assiduous reader has gathered, by now, that I am going through a lot of old papers, trying to throw out most of them. I am pleased to discover that, with a little practice, pitching worthless non-memorabilia is becoming easier. So far I have only been tempted to blog an entire pamphlet of board games whose unifying principle is that they have ( Read more... )

This is transcribed from a pamphlet I wrote in early 1977, describing a handful of games that were invented during a workshop I held at MIT in January of that year.

The game is played in several versions which differ only in board size. The order five game will be described here ( Read more... )

Dr. Wife and I are both borderline hoarders, and I have been trying, over the last couple of weeks, to do my part and get rid of some of my old stuff. I have a four-drawer filing cabinet in which there are lots of old papers, and I also have six or so boxes of unclassified papers that I haven't looked at for years. I have an interim goal, to get ( Read more... )

I really ought to sit down and write more often, instead of dragging it out. The writing definitely goes more smoothly when I do it every night, instead of waiting six or seven days between stints. Tonight's chapter was a surprisingly long one, but I think a bunch of it is just blither and can be trimmed. I wrote 2,036 words, for a total of 69, ( Read more... )

The chapter I just spent about an hour and a half writing has 1,876 words, for a total of 67,826. I tried, as GK suggested, to just relax and write, and while the story didn't deviate from the path that I seem to have roughed out for it, the writing went more smoothly and it felt like less effort. I think a lot of this recently-written material ( Read more... )

Well, this chapter is a bit shorter than average: only 1,464 words, for a total of 65,950. I'm still not very happy with the lack of smoothness. I think I know what's going on, and I don't know what I can do about it. During the years that I haven't been working on the story, I've still had ideas about it in the back of my mind, and now those ( Read more... )