There's a new vignette challenge up at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Grissom timeline, as Elaine breaks a cycle from her own childhood and takes a different approach with her own children.

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge on her Dreamwidth blog. My effort is also about Elaine, when she was first at Sparta Point, as she explains to Mikhael ( Read more... )

The more I think about the pronouncement that the word "was" automatically makes a sentence passive voice, the more it bothers me. Not just the fact that it's bad linguistics, not just the fact that, when coupled with the idea that passive voice is inherently bad, it cuts off a whole range of constructions that aren't passives, particularly the ( Read more... )

The theories about the drones and drone swarms on the East Coast are as varied as the day is long. Chinese? Russian? Iranian? One or another criminal gang? US government, military or civilian? Ordinary commercial and recreational drones being mistaken for something sinister ( Read more... )

Recently, a few commentators on the blogosphere are airing the idea that the drones are part of some sort of false flag operation on the part of the government, which is intended to create the conditions for the general public to not only accept, but actively demand a crackdown of some sort. Perhaps specifically on the ability of ordinary people to ( Read more... )

There are few things that can destroy my confidence in someone in a position of authority over matters literary than when they make an egregious error in matters in which they are claiming authority ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends is from Becky Jones: Portable time machines ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.I wasn't sure if I really wanted to start writing a time travel story, when I have so many starts that I've never finished. Maybe a very short, funny story about the absurd pickle a time traveler might get ( Read more... )

There's a video going around of an interview with the CEO of a corporation that makes drones for military and civil government operations. He's claiming that the mystery drones are most likely our own, a specific type of reconfigurable drone that can go from quadcopter to fixed-wing aircraft mode, and they're searching for something that the ( Read more... )

There's a new vignette challenge over at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Chongu Empire 'verse, as a young man considers his new home.

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge on her Dreamwidth blog. My effort is from the $NotEclipsePhase 'verse, as a young woman discovers more about how society is organized.

There's also a new writing challenge at ( Read more... )

Back in 1938, when radio broadcasting was still a relatively new medium, Orson Welles did an innovative radio play of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, presented as if it were a series of news flashes about Martians landing up and down the East Coast in realtime (as opposed to retelling the original novel's story of landings in Victorian England ( Read more... )

If you've been following the news, there have been a whole bunch of sightings of drones along the East Coast, particularly in New Jersey. These aren't the typical little quad-copters people buy to fly around in their yards. These are huge things, some as big as a mid-sized SUV, complete with lights typical of airplanes -- but they don't appear to ( Read more... )