With a curtsey to Michelle. This has been around and about for such a while that I’m struggling not to feel like the schmuck at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, but, hmm, perhaps the good authors of this site might need a little encouragement. What is the total number of books you own? Not ...
Back from working my way through a mountain of dirty clothes at the laundromat this afternoon. The inconvenience of not having our own machines is noted, but still, I’ve always found something oddly pleasing in the ritual trek. It’s made all the more significant when almost everything wearable one owns begins ...
I think this is one of my problems: I’m stuck for too much of the time in the meta-level processing of stories. Now, as I could bore on the subject for hours, I think meta-level story processing probably overwhelms story-level processing in a modern culture. Rather than relating to story characters as people whose ...
I don’t have good dreams. Never have. Nor do I have ‘bad’ dreams, except on extremely rare occasions. No, what I have are weird, surreal, fucked-up dreams. I also have the usual recurring dreams sometimes about running away from Something Bad, but here’s the thing: I figured out long ago that, though ...
Those store guides of yours. You know, the ones by the elevators. Well, perhaps this hadn’t occurred to you, but they’re actually metaphors. They don’t just tell clueless shoppers what’s on which floor. No, they also metaphorically represent the topology of the store. Cool, huh? So when your store ...
Some random notes from last month’s LA Times Festival of Books, before I forget the two days of peaceful rambling up and down the hills of UCLA. How relatively little fiction, for a start. How much space given to self-help books and self-publishing organisations (if that’s not contradictory). Ricky Jay was ...
Now that it seems Bad Wolf spoilers are creeping out of the BBC, it might be time to stick my neck out a bit before all is revealed. But first, a bit of appreciation, because the whole affair is a wonderful exercise in viral something-or-other. Not marketing, exactly. Just viral fun, I think. Most viewers ...
Not sure where this thought comes from today, but it’s pleasingly inconsequential. The work I did along the road to an aborted PhD in some ways boils down to advocating for the importance of a reader model in any system of automatic story generation. Forced to compress my ideas into a ten minute conference talk ...
A. has been bingeing on DVDs of 24 recently; bingeing might be the only way to capture its headlong rush. The programme has a very distinctive form. Such a long continuous narrative inevitably ends up being all middle, the same characters bouncing to and fro in a pinball plot, or perhaps circling in a holding ...
A. and I are in Portland, looking after her grandparents while her parents are away in Hawaii. The quiet, the huge, well-stocked house, and the presence of both a Chevy Tahoe and a BMW outside the front door ought to make this time something of a relaxing break from LA — and it is something ...