Wordle and Writing

Wordle is the new thing, judging from Twitter anyway, and there's a lot I like about it, honestly. It's amenable to logical thinking, it rewards having a big vocabulary, it doesn't take an egregiously long time to solve a puzzle, and best of all, it has a built-in limit: it only lets you play it…

Award Eligibility Post, 2021(ish)

Hi to everyone reading! It's been a while—I'm amazed this blog has perservered in my absence! It's not exactly a chore, but it can be emotional work, to write an eligibility post. I have never been quite comfortable with them—I'm not great at self-promotion, or anything like that. But I had a conversation with myself…

Stellar Wind and the VLISM

I have, I think, a time slot Sunday, May 30th at 7 p.m., at Balticon's science track, to talk about Interstellar Probe and the other current civilian space missions at Johns Hopkins APL. If you're not busy, and you have any interest, please stop by!  I hope it will be entertaining and maybe event a…

Maybe I’m really an essayist?

My essay "Writing About Robots" is up on From The Earth To the Stars, the Asimov's writers' blog. It started out as the author's notes for my story "Sentient Being Blues" which appears in the March/April 2021 Asimov's. But honestly, I'm prouder of it than of the story it's meant to comment on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So…

The Benefits of Slow Drafting

Harlan Ellison undertook a strange form of barnstorming. He would wedge himself into a glass display window, in a popular bookstore, and, as a crowd slowly accumulated outside, he would write a short story, from start to end, over the course of a day. He would tape the finished pages, one after the other, up…

Brief Eligibility Post for a Long Year

So grateful to have escaped from 2020 mostly intact, no major confrontations with the coronavirus, knock wood, and family and friends largely intact. We're not out of the woods yet, but I'm guardedly hopeful. Any words at all written or sold under these conditions feel like a victory. I hope I've not been so obsessed…

Competence Porn is my new Trail of Bread Crumbs

Times are hard; not uniquely hard, maybe, but we'd like to think so. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, etc. It's easy to get lost in the thicket of trying to assess the direness of the current moment. But nobody can argue in good faith that today isn't Bad, by any objective measure. Escapism…

beat, not beat

Boy, I am beat--not in the Kerouacian sense, overwhelmed by grace and overlove and exhaustion--more like, 'beat like a mule'. But not defeated. I have an absurd amount of privilege, a high, safe perch in the world, but even so, the bizarre overwhelming moment, the huge grinding crash of world events, it's too big for…

not an eligibility post

I'm back a month from Viable Paradise, and taking stock of things. The experience at Viable Paradise was transformative, surreal in its intensity and at some moments naked-wire crazy. Coming back from that has been a plunge into mundanity, and I'm having a hard time reconciling myself to 'normal' again. I'll try to write a…

Short Stories: Some Things To Try

Just listing these here for my own reference, but I'd be glad if they turned out to be helpful or interesting to anyone else. This list has been knocking around in my Notes app for too long, without any permanent home. Sometimes I need to stop and ask myself what I'm attempting to do with…