10 tips on writing fiction from some big names in writing The biggest one I took away from this is that I need to actually do the damn thing. Which is something I’ve been overlooking for too long now, aside from this bloggy-blog thing. I love writing and used to plop down and write a [...]

Image via Wikipedia From the Boston Globe: Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as “A People’s History of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa [...]

I’m writing a criticism of Jane Austin for school. Nothing special, nothing new. It’s in the “New Critical” style, which makes it somewhat boring and restricts my ability to say, “they’re flirting. duh.” That’s not the nerdy part. No, the nerdy part is that in my frustration to note something, I actually went looking for [...]

Lord Byron’s Great Insight: Mad, bad, and dangerous, he understood what women wanted. It is easy to see Byron as a cad, a narcissist and, at bottom, a misogynist. But that would be unfair. Byron’s great insight, in an era where women were expected to be placid and insipid (not that they were!), was to [...]

The Right Not to be offended? It’s a discredit to our national confidence that each time some impolite thought—perceived or otherwise—is uttered, sketched, or typed, a faction of professionally offended Americans engages in a collective hypersensitivity meltdown. It has been a long-standing custom for opponents to shut down debate by tagging adversaries with some dreadful [...]

should be like this guy.

Roissy tackles the freaks. I sadly worked with so many of these poor people while I was in the military. Many soldiers seek out ‘anything they can get’ simply because it is easy. Given the rapid and unforseen deployments, they are quite ready to pump and dump (provided they have any game). Many are naive [...]

Stephen King talks about God and ‘The Stand’: one of those staple books from my teen years. I think I’ve probably read it three or four times. That, and Gerald’s Game. I do enjoy a good vs. evil story -I mean, shit, they’re so abstract and polarized and fascinatingly perfect -even though I don’t think [...]

Featuring: me. Go forth and read issue #30. Specifically this: Esteban Canal’s Immortal Game as Applied to God. By me. Of course. Go read my story-it’s not really a story-read, motherfucker!

David Foster Wallace, dead: He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — [...]