Horror, joy, and other non-genres
I've seen various horror writers note that, in the words of author Douglas Winter, “Horror is not a genre, like...
The Lonely Goatherd and the Bechdel test
I wrote this the other day for a discussion of (among other things) works that do and don't pass the...
Fathers and stories: “Emerson’s Chevrolet”
I've written before about marvelous storyteller Willy Claflin. Today in the car his story “Emerson's Chevrolet” came up in my...
Chocolate produced by slaves
A lot of the world's chocolate supply is produced by child labor and slave labor. I've been trying for a...
Back
My back is still intermittently hurting. Sudden onset on Sunday afternoon for no apparent reason; saw a doctor Tuesday; it's...
Occam’s Razor revisited
Last night I was pretty upset because the radio in the room I was renting wouldn't turn off. My friends...
Optimistic pessimist haiku
A couple months ago, I was riding my bike home from work and I made some kind of minor interacting-with-other-people-in-traffic...
Useful source of digital assets, including background music
I recently encountered two videos that contained background music that I liked, and learned that both pieces of music were...
Queer sf revisited
It's been almost exactly twelve years since I posted a blog entry titled “Queer sf,” in which I noted that,...
How to write a first act the Pixar way
On the Toy Story 3 extras disc, there's a segment called “Beginnings: Setting a Story in Motion,” in which the...
Novel draft!
The first draft of my novel was 36k words long (and thus not technically a novel at all). It took...
Name changes at Ellis Island, and a woman in male attire
Until yesterday, I always believed that the stories of immigrants' names being changed against their will by officials at Ellis...