Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Cory Doctorow is such a phenomenon that I don’t even know how to hyperlink him – sci fi writer, editor/founder of Boing Boing, intellectual property reformist. Most pertinent to my own life, he was a teacher at Clarion West 2008, which perhaps you know. More pertinent than that, he’s the reason I went there. I’m [...]
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Sinclair Lewis writes really well. And for Minnesotans, he’s One of Us, so that makes him an even better writer. Here’s how Main Street starts: On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she [...]
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Well, I have just come across some information that pretty much guarantees the pilot episode of “A Game of Thrones” will get picked up for at least a full first season. The producers of the pilot are posting on the Westeros message boards and they have just revealed that the pilot’s final line of dialogue before [...]
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Two days ago I was reading in my book of Locus-winning short stories, and I came across the first Story That Blew My Mind that I’ve read in a long while. It’s called Persistance of Vision and is by a guy I’d never read before, named John Varley. The story was everything literature should be [...]
Look how much the top ten highest-earning authors make: 1. JK Rowling – $300m (£170m) 2. James Patterson – $50m (£28m) 3. Stephen King – $45m (£25m) 4. Tom Clancy – $35m (£20m) 5. Danielle Steel – $30m (£17m) 6. John Grisham – $25m (£14m) 6. Dean Koontz – $25m (£14m) 8. Ken Follett – [...]
Saturday, October 4, 2008
You’ve seen the strange clusters so often you don’t wonder anymore why they’re strange. For instance: why do people who think government should be small get fighting mad at the implication that humans have caused global warming? And why do libertarians inevitably have beards? Or at least some kind of weird facial hair that looks [...]