Varieties of Musical Experience
The year is 1967. Read more about Varieties of Musical Experience
The year is 1967. Read more about Varieties of Musical Experience
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
Thus begins Isak Dinesen's classic .
I know now that I will never get to Africa. That journey would require a younger, stronger me. Perhaps it's all right that some things remain a dream. Read more about Dreams of Africa
Read more about A Psychoanalysis of Firearms"We are going to study a problem that no one has managed to approach objectively, one in which the initial charm of the object is so strong that it still has the power to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep bringing them back to the poetic fold in which dreams replace thought and poems conceal theorems. This problem is the psychological problem posed by our convictions about fire. It seems to me so definitely psychological in nature that I do not hesitate to speak of a psychoanalysis of fire."
Some writers write about inspiration. I have ideas, but the writing itself? I couldn't pin down an inspiration for the life of me. The stuff drops off my fingertips. I'm not always sure where it comes from. Maybe it's in the wrist action.
I do have a couple of cautionary tales. Tales that tell me, don't worry about perfection. Just write the next word and keep going. Then go back and fix it. You don't want to be Joseph Grand or Larry Donner. Read more about Camus & Crystal
Couldn't sleep at all last night, and it's all because of history. Caught a little bit of Charlie Rose and a wonderful discussion of the Higgs bosun before drifting blissfully off, only to find myself awake at 2:30 or so. The episode of Sherlock Holmes then showing was a little too dramatic for sleep inducement, so I cruised a few channels looking for something interesting enough to keep my own thoughts at bay but soporific enough to send me back where I belonged, when I chanced upon this running on the other PBS station. Read more about Real People's History
Charles de Lint, or CdL as he is known among the fanbase, is primarily responsible for convincing me that I could put fantasy elements into a novel that takes place in the world I live in. Urban fantasy is a kind of everyperson's magical realism. Read more about CdL
It's my new favorite word. Paracosm. I learned it today in an op-ed piece by David Brooks, whose take on things political and cultural I sometimes appreciate and with which I, on very occasional occasions, agree. Read more about Paracosm
I drove to Nye Beach this last weekend for my first official reading of in a real live bookstore. The bookstore was Things Rich and Strange, owned by my friends Michael and Mary Babinski. Read more about A Worthy Rival
My fellow critics at Writer's Cramp are constantly carping about what they see as a certain passivity in my fiction. Where's the tension? they keep asking. Where's the conflict? Why does she keep stopping to eat? Why doesn't she kick some ass?
I have begun responding (rather sulkily, I must admit), "Isn't there enough tension in the world? Don't we have enough conflict?" Read more about On Edge
When I fall in love with a name, I find myself walking around the house rolling that name around in my head, concocting an image of the one who bears it. One of those names that has found a place in my imagination for all the years since I first heard it is the unlikely name May Theilgaard Watts. Read more about Reading the Landscape