David Foster Wallace, the author who recently committed suicide, was a favorite of a friend of mine. I decided to check his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men out from the library, and I very much recommend it. I'd worried, based on excerpts, that Wallace's work would be shallow and too clever, too self-consciously ironic. And there are aspects ( Read more... )

Sudden Poll! Break my heart. Recommend a song, a story, a novel, a poem, an article, a website. Tell a heartrending anecdote. Film is acceptable, but not my preferred format. Bonus points if I cry ( Read more... )

The Lighthouse Chronicles

This story has its origins in Mr. Brett and myself suddenly becoming lighthouse cultists. The exact mechanism of our conversion is too boring to describe here; suffice to say we were startled to come upon an exquisite lighthouse in Michigan, whose door bore a description of the Volunteer Keepers Program inviting ( Read more... )

I was recently reminded of an incident I experienced with the Editor I Couldn't Get Along With For The Life Of Me. He sent me a piece of writing in which he used the analogy of a motor to describe a phenomenon in a fantasy world. I pointed out that the analogy was jarring and he changed it, which may have been the only time he ever listened to me ( Read more... )

In an amazing followup to recent conversations about face-macing, Housemate Abby actually maced herself in the face at dinner recently. Apparently, she thought the mace distribution mechanism was a flashlight ( Read more... )

Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) is a figure I never knew much about until my Internet crush cooper_korman quoted heavily from her 1934 book, Seven Gothic Tales. As it happens, she was born into a Unitarian family in late 1800s Denmark; she lived her life to quite a romantic extent -- running about Africa, publishing fiction and engaging in remarkable ( Read more... )

I head to GenCon tomorrow!

* An anthology that I contributed a short story to will be on sale in the Writer's Alley or whatever it's called. It's titled Ransom: The Anthology, and the theme is (you guessed it) ransom. (All the stories therein are science fiction or fantasy, too.) I don't know a whole lot about it save that a story was also ( Read more... )

Sudden Poll! Give me a reason.

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Orange Cookies!I made this recently and it turned out pretty well. Definitely orange-flavoured, which seems like it'd be hard to perfect for cookies! (I skipped the icing ( Read more... )

He entered my room and said: "Poor creature, you who understand nothing, who know nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things which you do not suspect." I followed him ( Read more... )