A friend recently wrote on Facebook that the backlash over No Man’s Sky seems to indicate the growing* belief that art somehow owes it audience. While I’ve largely abandoned keeping up with game news so I can’t say whether that’s true of the game or its players, reading that definitely struck a chord. They’re on to something ( Read more... )

I’ve owned a Kindle for a little over a year and I’m still undecided how I feel about it. A friend bought one before I did to save space and money-the academic books we tend to use in the PhD are so expensive, he’d quickly make up the cost of an e-reader by switching to e-books. So I went ahead with a similar mindset-plus the hope that I could have ( Read more... )

I have a strange habit: When I buy a new novel, I make a point of reading the first line, regardless of how many other books are ahead of it in the queue. I’m not sure when I started doing it, or why-or at least, I’m not sure I had a reason at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I can probably venture a hypothesis or two ( Read more... )

I’d consider myself devoted to short fiction. About a sixth of my personal library is made up of anthologies and collections. Each year I read over a hundred short stories. I look forward to new releases from my favorite authors as much as anyone, but I get a special frisson of excitement when the next publication collects their latest short work. ( Read more... )

I’ve had an idea sitting on the backburner for years now. Ever since I started keeping track of my reading in a given year, I’ve found that one or two books often stand out among the bunch. I’ve wanted to devote a post to each of those books but, to do any justice, I wanted to revisit those books and really immerse myself in them, give myself time ( Read more... )

It’s been nearly a year since the furor over the How I Met Your Mother series finale. I had thoughts about it then, but the rest of the Internet did such a good job grumbling that I saw no need to add my voice to the chorus. But while I saw some of my ideas given shape-Chunk Wendig’s write-up is pretty spot-on-nobody said just what I wanted to say ( Read more... )

For the past few months I’ve essentially lived in a bubble. I read little outside of my school work, virtually ignored online news, so I’ve had only the faintest idea of what’s been happening in the world. But as the semester ended I started returning to the surface for air and discovered that several spec fic magazines had emerged since I’d last ( Read more... )

I hated reading for a good chunk of my life. I didn’t struggle with it or anything; I just didn’t enjoy it-until I discovered science fiction and fantasy, that is. By degrees, everything changed after that. I looked forward to reading, I started buying books, I found my way to writing.

But, despite trying to make up for lost time and all my ( Read more... )

As the previous post makes clear, I can go for depressingly long stretches of time without writing, but I’m unable to function if I’m not reading for fun, even sporadically. Which got me thinking about the trade-off of time spent writing and time spent reading, what the golden ratio is ( Read more... )

I haven’t finished a story in the past year. This spring was so frenetic I barely had time to do any leisure reading to maintain my sanity. (I’m disappointed if I don’t write regularly, but I practically collapse if I go too long without reading from my own shelves.) So I had one resolution for this summer: I’d write and finish a short story draft- ( Read more... )