This is a piece about my writing method that Marleen Barr asked me to submit for an online journal (Deletions) she was guest -editing. In it we meet the pesky voice of my subconscious mind:

http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/murgatroyd-maybe/

If you haven’t read China Miéville before this - or if you enjoy thinking about how languages work and whether or not we have any hope of deciphering alien ones - you owe it to yourself to read Embassytown. His books are not the easiest to read; they demand that you pay attention and think about what he’s proposing. If you’re expecting a mindless ( Read more... )

The novella telling the end of the lingster saga will be the cover story for THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION's Feb/March issue. Here's the cover painting, by Kent Bash.


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Here's the opening scene of the new lingster novella that (I hope) ties up the entire saga of the Guild of Xenolinguists. It's tentatively slated to appear in the March/April 2011 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (The title may change; I'm not totally satisfied with it ( Read more... )

The Online Oxford English Dictionary of science fiction citations decided that I was the first person to use the term “xenolinguist,” back in 1988. If so, I did it barely aware of the significance of what I was doing. I had written a novel (Triad) and a short story, “Babel Interface,” plus a non-fiction essay (“Berlitz in Outer Space”) before I ( Read more... )

I really pushed hard yesterday and reached the end of the "LastLingsterNovella" (working title, “The Evening and the Morning"). It stands at almost 28,000 words, about the length of “Reading the Bones ( Read more... )

I wish somebody had warned me, when I wrote the first lingster story, that I had just set out to create a whole series of tales about communicating with aliens, my own universe, let alone an entire Guild of Xenolinguists with all its rules and precepts. I might have taken the endeavor more seriously right from the start instead of having to make it ( Read more... )

Phoenix was hot! (Well, duh.) The Mission Palms Hotel in Tempe (site of a recent Nebula Conference) has a very lovely pool, and that helped even though the mercury was already soaring by 7 am. I didn't step off the hotel grounds between arrival Thursday morning and departure Sunday afternoon ( Read more... )

I'm packing for Westercon in Tempe, over the July 4th weekend. I already took the greyhounds to stay with my daughter. The cat and I will spend a romantic night alone together here before my plane leaves tomorrow morning. I'm sure he's thrilled ( Read more... )

If you haven't seen it yet, do so this weekend. The new STAR TREK movie is well worth seeing. The young actors are excellent in their roles, not obviously trying to ape the mannerisms of the original cast but managing to suggest them in subtle ways. We get explanations for all manner of puzzling things in the series -- such as why Kirk calls Dr ( Read more... )