March 2011

All, I’m out of town for the week at a workshop.  I thought I would have more time and inclination to blog, but I don’t, so I’ll be back next Monday unless something changes.

So I tried the thing I talked about the other day, where I tried to make a story out of the first few ideas I came across. I went over to BoingBoing and ended up with: Low serotonin levels make mice more bisexual and Japan Crisis:  What’s next for nuclear energy in the U.S.? Which

Amanda Hocking seems to be trying to get a book deal from a traditional publisher, despite the fact that she’s making boatloads of money selling her books independently. Barry Eisler turned down a $500K traditional deal to publish independently. Who’s right?  Who’s an idiot?  Who is completely letting down the publishing community?  Who is going to

I’m almost done with Ray’s book, and for some reason this morning when I woke up (after a strange dream about DC being on an island, paying museum admission with heart-shaped silver dollars, and Ray falling asleep as soon as we got there), I knew I had to figure out right away what I was

I had another night full of nightmares about going out of business. People have tried to give me good advice on the writing business.  I’ve listened, but I’ve made the mistakes anyway.  There are some lessons you can only learn by living through them, I think; those lessons vary from person to person, but these

Over the course of the last few days, I’ve been trying to download more books to my Nook, in preparation of going on a trip. One of the books that I’ve been meaning to read is Christopher Moore’s Lamb, which has been repeatedly recommended to me. I decided to buy an ebook copy of the

I worked on a story this weekend that had a split character in it.  I read an article a few weeks ago about this kind of character, and I think it’s been on my mind ever since.  There’s probably a technical name for this, but I can’t remember where I saw the article, and I

I got onto a strange twitter thread yesterday called #zombieproverbs, in which we took various cliches and made them applicable to zombies, like “A brain in the hand is worth two in the skull” and whatnot. I was toodling along with things like, “Two’s company and three’s lunch,” and “When the going gets tough, the

A doppelganger is a “ghostly counterpart of a living person, a double, or an alter ego.”  If a person looks in the mirror, and the face in the mirror does something different than the person making the reflection, or if there’s an evil twin of you running around and doing bad things you couldn’t possibly