Much as I liked the show, this is about the actual planet. As someone who writes about Mars, I’ve got kind of a vested interest–then again, as a resident of Earth I’ve got kind of a vested interest anyway. Assuming we don’t manage to wipe ourselves out (a prospect which, though it will always remain [...]
Last night’s post about the exciting new developments in fringe cosmology provoked some interesting twitter comments. Seems some of the language in the article I linked to (particularly at the end, where it talks about vested interest) reminded some of you of denialist language from one or another favorite science/history denial camps. Specifically, the word [...]
Big Bang contrarians are a dime a dozen, from the crackpots to the respected physicists, like Halton Arp, who like to pick nits at the existing paradigm but don’t have a coherent alternate theory to advance. They’re usually good for an afternoon’s entertainment, but little more than that. Sometimes, though, the exciting stuff happens in [...]
If you want the background for this post, check The Binge post for a description of my recent unintentional astronomical word count adventure. Short version: I wrote one hundred twenty three thousand words in fifty days. Yow. So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days? Plenty. What do [...]
By the time I finish writing this article, I’ll have written 123,000 words in fifty days. The output constitutes two short-book-length works (one novel, one reference work), nine blog posts, two commissioned articles, and some odds and ends of work on another novel. For the first half of the duration, I did it by accident. [...]
Give me a thousand words or so (or less) on the most unlikely movie, story, or song that made you cry, and what it taught you about your own preferred artform, if anything. Include a short bio with links to your work. I’ll put the stories up as guest blog posts, and hopefully we can generate more traffic for your projects while giving our audiences a unique glimpse into our bizarre creative processes.
May 19, 2010 is an interesting day in the history of the world, though its significance passed by unnoticed by most people – even people who watch for momentous events. But today, two thing happened that will, in their knock-on effects, change the world in ways every bit as profound as the discovery of DNA. [...]
Last night I had occasion to send an email to Spider Robinson, thanking him for his recent book Variable Star, a posthumous collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein. If you are unfamiliar with Spider’s work, or have not read Variable Star, you owe it to yourself to take a gander. All royalties from the book go [...]
As part of my self-education as a writer learning to market his work, I’ve been watching trends in e-books and audiobooks as well as publishing industry trends, and thinking about them in the context of podcasting as an endeavor that takes a lot of passion and commitment from very creative people. With all the talk [...]
Free content – particularly in the audio fiction space – suddenly seems a lot less of a perpetual free lunch than it did six months ago, and it’s got a lot of folks freaking out in my corner of the Internet. Providers are dropping like flies this year! Matthew Wayne Selznick and J.C. Hutchins have [...]
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WritingPosted on March 1st, 2010
Demographic disclosure: I am an American who likes good adult (note the lack of euphemistic quotation marks) entertainment, and I am disgusted and ashamed at what thirty years of cultural conservatism has done to my country. Perhaps I’d better back up and explain…
This post is my first in a dialogue with Scott Roche about whether or not science and religion are truly competing for the same intellectual and spiritual space in the world. Read Scott’s opening post here. Twitter is a mischievous little meme. On that innocent network yesterday, I noticed fellow podcast novelist, and fabulous debate [...]
Stopping in quickly during a break in my hectic production and writing schedules to drop a handful of links that have recently blown me away in one way or another. First, the coolest biomedical news this year: Synthetic arteries have arrived. Second, some really cool news on dog evolution from two fronts. There’s an article [...]
For those of you not following along, in the current book of The Antithesis Progression, one character is using a hormone cocktail on another as a chemical leash. I’ve gotten some questions about what these weaponized chemicals are supposed to accomplish, how they’re supposed to work, and whether they’re a good choice for the purposes [...]
Of the complicated pile of…legacy…that we have to untangle from the cultural madness we Americans indulged in during the Naughties (that’s the ’00 decade, where pretty much every public figure engaged with politics, public policy, economics, social action, environmentalism, culture wars, and foreign policy acted impulsively, childishly, and shamefully), perhaps none is more irritating than [...]