Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 163 entries, all of them here in full.
November 13, 2015 · 163 words
Atonement Bargain
My novel Days of Atonement, which I have described as “the world’s only gothic Western science fiction police procedural,” is on sale for a mere 99 cents. You may find it via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, Google, and iBooks. It’s one of the books which, as the years go by, I find pleases me […]
Read entry →November 12, 2015 · 556 words
Reviews in the Nick of Time: Ken and the Muppets
I don’t watch a lot of sitcoms. It’s not that I don’t like to laugh, I just don’t have a lot of time for TV, and I choose to spend most of my limited TV time with dramas, possibly because dramas are pretty much what I write for a living, and that’s what interests me. […]
Read entry →November 11, 2015 · 432 words
Grand Tour
This grim-faced, big-eared fellow is I believe the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhat III (my notes are a little unclear). Just before leaving New York, we caught a special exhibit at the Met featuring goodies from the Middle Kingdom, which was a period of economic growth, massive building, and foreign trade, sandwiched
Read entry →November 2, 2015 · 682 words
Big City
I’m off on a trip to an Undisclosed Location. And as I have in the past, I’ve inserted a clue as to my present location in the above photograph. The clever among you may be able to work out where I am. As you can see from this second photograph, business is booming here in […]
Read entry →November 1, 2015 · 487 words
Contents
Tonight was Patricia Rogers’ legendary biannual Halloween Party, complete with Victorian coffins, mummies, body parts, bubbling flasks, sinister laboratory instruments, brains in bell jars, a tilting, electronically charged autopsy table, and a whole lot of science fiction and fantasy writers and fans dressed up as mon
Read entry →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
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