Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 55 entries, all of them here in full.
August 31, 2025 · 112 words
Splash
The Dawes Glacier was calving like crazy on this warm afternoon, but not when my camera was pointing in the right direction. Here’s the best photo I got: it shows nothing falling but it does show the big splash afterward. The sound was a big BOOM followed by the crash of water as the ice […]
Read entry →August 31, 2025 · 65 words
Blue World
Another day, another glacier. This is the Dawes Glacier at the end of the Endicott Arm, as viewed from our catamaran. The weather has been phenomenally good, sunny and in the sixties or the low seventies. The locals tell us how lucky we are not to have Nature hurl buckets of frigid water at our […]
Read entry →August 30, 2025 · 216 words
Hubbard
Once we were in Seattle, it seemed only sensible to keep heading northwest, so here we are in Alaska, viewing the Hubbard Glacier from a catamaran. The glacier is 76 miles long and 7 miles wide as it enters Disenchantment Bay. The ice wall is 17 storeys high and extends a further 200 feet under […]
Read entry →August 12, 2025 · 210 words
Momentum
I’ll be heading to Worldcon tomorrow, and afterwards enjoy a couple weeks’ vacation. This was all planned months ago, without knowing I was going to be trying to finish Heaven in Flames around this time. I finished the penultimate chapter last week, and then decided not to write the finale right away, but go back [&hel
Read entry →August 9, 2025 · 337 words
I Invent the Influencer
Every so often I realize that I’ve predicted the future in one of my stories, which is what SF writers are ideally supposed to do, for all that we do it accidentally. (If we actually try to predict the future, we end up looking stupid when we fail.) I was signing The Green Leopard Plague […]
Read entry →August 8, 2025 · 83 words
Skulls, Flags, Space
A couple weeks ago I was on a Zoom panel with several colleagues. It seems the Center for Space Crime, Piracy, and Governance thought that science fiction writers might be useful in contributing to their ongoing discussions. James Cambias was enlisted to wrangle Allen Steele, Geoff Landis, Laura Montgomery, and My Owns
Read entry →August 2, 2025 · 442 words
Heaven in Flames Watch
July 24, 2025 I was rolling along on a new scene when I remembered I was making a Zoom presentation in the morning, and I needed to get my notes in order. So I put my notes in order. Made the presentation. Had a good time. And now it’s back to the novel. July 25 […]
Read entry →July 24, 2025 · 432 words
Day by Day, Play by Play
[July 19] I’m pleased to report that I have only a few scenes to write in my long-delayed project, “Heaven in Flames,” the third book in my Metropolitan sequence. It’s taken me three and a half years to get this far. This is by far the longest amount of time I’ve ever taken to write […]
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