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The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Neitzche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! —The opening sentence of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being I am 121 pages into The Unbearable Lightness […]
Well, this is the last item on my list of tips for how to be a kickass writer. I have lots more ideas about what makes somebody good at writing, especially writing novels, but these are the big five I keep thinking about. Read whatever you want, and read as much as you can. Forget […]
As the Northern Hemisphere thinks about thawing for the summer, I think about love. Fabulous love. Lots of love. Of all kinds. Here’s another story posted on the Daily Cabal in the way back. Every day I watch the people on the bus over the top of my math book. I’ve given them names. There’s […]
So the advance reader copy (ARC to those in the biz of my new book, The Halcyon Bird, arrived in the mail this past Thursday. There’s still nothing like holding my new book in my hand. It felt great with the first book, and it’s still magnificent with the second one. I wonder what it […]
Picasso: For me, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line! Einstein: Likewise. —Steve Martin, Picasso at the Lapin Agile A very dear man named Jack White, who is a painter and advisor of other painters, puts a twist on the old idea that when you have a goal you write it […]
Another reprint/repost from the Daily Cabal, and another favorite of mine. When the human race grew up a bit and got more sense, and matters on Earth were better in hand, we had a chance to look further about the place, just as we had always wanted to:—and when the time was right, making the […]
Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet’s eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth…but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns. –P G Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime Along with “I could never let anyone […]
I feel this is one of the best shorts I ever wrote for the Daily Cabal. It is certainly one of my all-time favorites. Enjoy! Tell me what you think. The Queen of Egypt sat on the steps of her House, watching her father’s boat start across the sky. She thought she could almost see […]
This story was originally published Winter Solstice 2009, on the Daily Cabal. Enjoy! It was a great golden topaz. A man in rags carried it in his last pocket across the hundred-year ice, until he came to the watch house at the mountain’s foot. The sentry took him in and gave him soup. “What’s your […]
Roma non fu fatta in un giorno.—Rome wasn’t built in a day.—Proverb OK, so you’ve cleared the crap out of the way. You’ve got your computer all warmed up. Now how to write for two thousand words a day like the fabulous John Scalzi, or fifteen hundred like the equally fabulous me, or for eight […]