Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,174 entries, all of them here in full.
October 28, 2015 · 105 words
Dancing Along
These guys, who have been dancing in Rouen for hundreds of years now, are having a lot more fun than I am right now. For one thing, I’m not in Rouen. Location aside, this week it’s been one little thing after another. No big crises, no big triumphs, just a lot of little detail I […]
Read entry →October 23, 2015 · 391 words
Gulf & Western
Yeah. This guy. So I was talking to Daniel the other day, and I said, “I’m going to do the most unhip thing I’ve done in ages.” “What’s that?” “I’m going to see Jimmy Buffet in concert.” Daniel thought about that for a while, and he said, “I think Buffet’s been in the business so […]
Read entry →October 22, 2015 · 869 words
Year Five
This summer I completed my fifth year as an indie author, albeit one who markets only his own backlist. And then to top it all off, I sold six books to traditional publishers. So. Yeah. All that. The upshot is that every long work I’ve ever written is now available in electronic form, in most […]
Read entry →October 16, 2015 · 592 words
End the World in Style
In the popular imagination, Doomsday isn’t any fun. I mean, all the radiation and the ruins and the heavily-armed mutant gangs are the sort of thing that can make the end of the world a real drag. And even if you’ve done your doomsday prep, you’re still stuck in a buried RV with your heavily-armed […]
Read entry →October 13, 2015 · 363 words
New Package
Introducing the new cover for my novel Days of Atonement, which replaces a cover designed in the days when I was fairly new to Photoshop. I was trying really hard to think of a cover that said, “gothic western science fiction police procedural,” which is what the novel is, and I overthought it and threw in too much [&h
Read entry →October 11, 2015 · 171 words
Fustilarian
Over on another Social Network, I was rejoicing that I’d written a sentence containing the phrase “fustilarian bellygods.” This occasioned a deal of speculation about what my sentence actually was. I declined to answer, because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of imagination that was going on. And I thought I’d stim
Read entry →October 7, 2015 · 690 words
Peakéd Oil
I’m currently paying $2.09 per gallon of gasoline, which is the lowest I’ve paid in a very, very long time— and which may, if you adjust for inflation, be the lowest gasoline price ever. Ten years ago, people were saying that we’d met, or even passed, Peak Oil, wherein the supply was just going to go […]
Read entry →September 30, 2015 · 472 words
Nite 2
I saw fewer new acts the second night of Globalquerque, but that’s because some of the first night’s performers returned. I’ll skip over those and get straight to the folks I hadn’t seen before. Tony Duncan is one of the talented Duncan brothers, all hoop dancers, and has won the World Champion Hoop Dancer award [&hell
Read entry →September 29, 2015 · 733 words
First Night of the Festival
More music from Globalquerque, New Mexico’s annual celebration of music from all over the world. There were three stages going on at once, so I didn’t see everybody, and for several of the bands I only saw a few minutes. Here are some of the highlights. Cimmarón was advertised as a cowboy band from Colombia, […]
Read entry →September 28, 2015 · 149 words
A Band of One
I’ve been frantically busy and with little time for posting. I’ve spent the last two nights at Globalquerque, the annual festival of world music, and will post more on that when I have a few free hours But in the meantime here’s a video of Maarja Nuut, who I saw the other night. She’s […]
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