Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,180 entries, all of them here in full.
August 4, 2017 · 83 words
Gustaf Slept Here
We are in lovely Stockholm. This involved 13 miserable hours on a ferry from Turku, though the misery was mitigated by glorious views of first the Finnish, and then the Swedish, archipelago. By the end I didn’t care about the archipelago, I just wanted to get off the damn boat. Stockholm’s series of islands is [&hellip
Read entry →August 1, 2017 · 284 words
Archipalego
So a military attaché, a philosopher, and a couple writers went out on a boat . . . Sounds like the beginning of a joke, and maybe it was, but I assure you it actually happened. Friend of the blog Marcus Prest (author of Android, etc.) has been playing host to us in Turku for the […]
Read entry →July 27, 2017 · 222 words
Lakeland
This week we’ve been looked after by my Finnish friend Kari Salo, who I’ve known since he came to stay with my family when we were both fifteen. Kari and his lovely wife Anneli invited us to her lakeside summer cottage, where we enjoyed kicking back with a beer and a sauna after our busy […]
Read entry →July 23, 2017 · 50 words
Drinking Your Beer in Finland
We’ve left Russia behind and are back in Finland for the next week or so. Finland has some of the most complex rules in the world for alcohol consumption. Those of you coming to the Helsinki Worldcon might find them confusing, so here’s Ismo Leikola to give you a briefing.
Read entry →July 22, 2017 · 271 words
Nabokov’s Butterflies
At one point in my life, the author and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov was my primary literary god. He’s still a major influence, for all that I don’t write anything like him. There is a museum devoted to him in St. Petersburg, in his family’s old mansion. (You can’t really describe it as “his” house, […]
Read entry →July 19, 2017 · 601 words
Scamming Scammers Scam Amazon With Scamming Scams
Kindle Unlimited, for those of you who don’t know, is an Amazon service where (if you’re an author) you upload your book exclusively to KU. In return for this exclusivity, Amazon does . . . well, I’m not sure what they do for the author, but if you’re a reader, you can read, um, Unlimited numbers of […]
Read entry →July 15, 2017 · 709 words
Lost in Transition
All sorts of things happened en route to Finland, though none of them actually happened to us. The problem was that very little actually happened once we got into the little commuter mini-jet to fly to Chicago, which was the first leg of a long-distance triad that was supposed to continue to JFK, and from […]
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