Would any fiction writer I know find good use in the expression "needs must," as in, "Well, if needs must then we'll do that horrid thing we don't want to do..."?


( Read more... )

In seeing Salinger, I was blown away by it-and I’ve never wanted to be a writer more than I did as I left Hollywood Hits in Danvers. (Don’t worry. The feeling faded.) Yet it’s a strange film because it's a documentary that serves to remove gaps from a subject that remains relatively unknown. It's almost a movie about how hard it is to make a movie ( Read more... )

greygirlbeast brought up slang today and my comment ran long, so I figured I'd put it here:
An odd thing. I was complaining to Spooky about baffling online slang, and that led to a general discussion of slang as a phenomenon associated more with subcultures than with linguistic evolution, and to a discussion of slang that attended various times and scenes and ( Read more... )

I normally don't wade into celeb scandals of the moment, but the Internet seems to be on fire with this one--so I'm chiming in ( Read more... )

On May 17th, I posted about this pact I've made with myself where I'm not going to buy books just because I want to. The good news is that I thought it was only a few weeks ago and it turns out it has been almost two months. The heart of the problem is that I buy more books than I will ever read because I like owning more books than I can ( Read more... )

“The good middle-class people of the world-being the very best sort of person to be, not grimy and ignorant like the proletariat, nor blood-soaked maniacs like the inbred elite-are usually very considerate, so I had hopes that I wouldn’t be facing a reanimate.”

Nick Mamatas, The Last Weekend

“Our society is run by insane people for insane ( Read more... )

To the best of my recollection, this was some sort of Oulipo experiment where, during Naropa's Summer Writing Program in 2000 or 2001, either for a course on the rhetoric of madness with Brian Evenson or a course on experimental poetry mashup techniques with Laura Mullen, I intentionally wrote a somewhat bad / clichéd cyberpunky paragraph, then ran ( Read more... )

So I have this issue with buying books. I need to take a break. The piles are getting insane again even though most of the books are boxed away. Here are the most recent purchases. I think I bought all of these on the same day about two weeks ago. I hope by listing them here, I will encourage others to check them out, but I also now have a list of ( Read more... )

On February 12th, the estimable and lovely Matt Cheney suggested I post about Carol Emshwiller in honor of her 90th birthday, which was three days ago. He even set up this extraordinary project for the whole shebang and you can go there to be inspired and enlightened.

Yet, even with two months notice, I only got as far as putting Verging on the ( Read more... )

Still digging through ancient bookmarks and re-reading writing bits and tips as I try to get my head on straight and get back to writing fiction.

Here's "How to Rewrite" by Justine Larbalestier is sort of a classic by now. One of those simple instructional posts that makes sense to me even when the typing has beaten me senseless. Larbalestier just ( Read more... )