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Okay. Say your story is set in London in the early 19th century, and you've established that a group of characters are poor. They're a guild of servant-class laborers who collectively have not had work in months. And they were never well paid or prosperous to begin with. And now, because of public antipathy, these guys have been stuck in their ( Read more... )

One of our junior-most faculty came into the office this morning to tell me that she had been laughing out loud on the bus to work while reading my minutes of the previous month's faculty meeting. It's always gratifying when someone notices. Most especially when it's my very favoritest of they junior faculty, which is a very hard won laurel, given ( Read more... )

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I got a little note from YouGov (I must stop calling them PollingPoint, they haven't used that name for a while) saying they would like to feature my essay on their website. So that's good, I reckon. What's interesting is that they asked me to review/rewrite the final sentence for clarity because they thought there must be a typo. As far as I ( Read more... )

The Polling Point people are running essay contests through the election, requesting opinion-driven essays (blog posts, really) and videos on various issues. The current one is on the prompt, "If you could speak directly to Obama and Romney, what would you tell them they had to do to secure your vote?" What follows is my take -- it's a short ( Read more... )

So many bits and bobs I think about and don't get around to writing. RSN a brief consideration of my thoughts on first reading Alan Garner's Weirstone of Brisingamen, but that is not yet. For now, a little bit of random meme-cruft for LJ is perhaps better than nothing at all. So here's a thing I picked up from mrissa1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your ( Read more... )

Hal and I watched another episode of James Burke's BBC series Connections last night. Wow this is fascinating stuff! I never watched the series when it aired in the late 1970s, but it holds up surprisingly well for television that's three decades old. Burke is a science historian, and each episode traces the scientific and technological ( Read more... )

Earlier today I spotted this post over on James Nicoll's LJ. All unknowing whose birthday (or more correctly, baptismal date) it was, I answered that if I could resurrect any author at the height of their powers knowing they would be brains-craving zombies, I would choose William Shakespeare. Well, then Abi over at Making Light started a sonnet ( Read more... )

( Cut Because, Like, Totally Spoilerific, Dudes )