Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 178 entries, all of them here in full.
February 12, 2014 · 1,757 words
Lessons For Writers: The Beatles Edition
So here in the States we’re celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Beatles landing in New York, and at least one local station played nothing but Beatles the other night. And what did I think about? I thought about what writers could learn from the Beatles. I was actually alive and present on the planet […]
Read entry →February 9, 2014 · 430 words
Boskone Schedule
I’ll be in Boston for Boskone this coming weekend, and if you’re in the area you should definitely stop by and say hello. Here’s my schedule, to make it all the easier to find me. The New SF/F Thriller Friday 20:00 – 20:50 Here’s one subgenre that’s really taken hold these days. Examples: Neal Stephenson’s [&hell
Read entry →February 7, 2014 · 65 words
More Tips for Writers
In another of our series of tips for writers, a brief cautionary video about what might happen once you start getting lost in your own complicated fantasy epic. <via Terry England> UPDATE: Well, the embed code sucketh, so it won’t play here. But you can clink the handy link, so that you’ll be transported to their
Read entry →February 5, 2014 · 176 words
Stripey
So here we have a sea snake, in fact the deadly “sea cobra,” heading for the surface to breathe (which it has to, ‘cuz it’s a reptile). The venom can kill, but the snake’s mouth is quite small, and it has a hard time opening wide enough to get a grip on a full-grown human. […]
Read entry →February 4, 2014 · 56 words
55 Years
The Day the Music Died was 55 years ago today. This is the only video I could find of Buddy Holly performing, though— as there’s no guitar lead visible— I imagine he’s just miming to his own record. But then he was far from the last person to mime a Buddy Holly song, now was […]
Read entry →February 3, 2014 · 388 words
Shocked
So I was in my local greasy spoon the other day, paying for my breakfast, and I saw a delivery that had been left on the counter near the cash register, a big cardboard box with the words SOPAIPILLA SYRUP. And I think my heart probably skipped a beat. Certainly my knees almost gave way. […]
Read entry →January 29, 2014 · 955 words
Ambiguity
Back in September, friend of the blog Marcus Geduld posted a long, thoughtful essay in response to an essay I wrote about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. That essay was my response to a literary writer turning to a science fiction trope, and necessarily involved theorizing about the differences between literary
Read entry →January 24, 2014 · 75 words
We Make Writers
Writers are made, not born. The talent itself may be innate, but it must be conditioned and developed, and developed in such a way to maximize the writer’s potential. At Taos Toolbox, we don’t tell you what to write, we help you make what you write better. If you want to write better, you need […]
Read entry →January 19, 2014 · 711 words
Reviews in the Nick of Time: Saving Mr. Banks
I was surprised that Saving Mr. Banks received only one Oscar nomination (for Original Music), since it’s such a well-written, well-acted film with a powerhouse cast of past and future Oscar contenders: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell, Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman. Thompson is terrific, an
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