|
July 15th, 2013
You can escape into art, even if it's not.
It’s always good to have a way out. Even if you are lucky enough not to live in a war zone or a country where paranoid folks can walk the streets carrying concealed weapons, there comes a time for most of us when we […]
May 6th, 2013
Be your own Buddha
When you tell people you’re a writer the first thing they ask is, “Oh, what do you write?”
Then, after you tell them you write fiction, they tell you what kind of book they read, if they read at all. If you don’t write the sort of book they […]
March 25th, 2013
We are all adrift, bound for unknown shores.
Of all the genres in all the fictional universe there’s only one that has never persuaded me to cast my doubts aside and surrender. Stories about time travel leave me cold.
So when I heard the buzz about the 2012 indie film “Safety Not Guaranteed” […]
January 12th, 2013
Sock It To Me
Okay, so here’s my guilty secret. I like movies where things explode.
Not all movies where things explode. But when Bruce Willis, or someone of his stripe, sets off to save the planet with a quip and a smirk, I enjoy the payoff as much as any backyard […]
March 29th, 2012
It’s not as easy as it once was to get lost in this world.
In these technology infested times, the proliferation of gadgets that can tell you where you’re going, how to get there, and what it will cost you has taken some of the zest out of travel. Still, most of us would gladly […]
October 2nd, 2011
The original woodblock by Deborah Harris of Fergus the Green Man.
For those of us who enjoy spending a large portion of our lives reading fiction, the borderline between the world of the imagination and the so-called real world is sketched in erasable ink. We whose literary passports bear the stamps of dozens […]
September 19th, 2011
The face that launched a thousand pirate quips.
Seattle loves pirates. Don’t we all?
Not, of course, the real, bloodthirsty, unwashed, yellow-toothed criminals who robbed and raped their way around the high seas back in the day. No, the pirates we love are the cute and cuddly comedians whose sense of fashion is […]
August 3rd, 2011
I like long books.
Some readers don’t. Some prefer slender paperbacks, which tuck tidily into a suitcase, books which promise not to weigh the reader down with sorrow or reality, even when the plots involve serial murders or child molesters. In fiction, we can expect to enjoy the satisfactions of justice, or, failing that, at […]
March 6th, 2011
It Takes All Kinds
I spent most of yesterday being someone I’m not. Sort of a vacation from myself. I wasn’t alone.
At the Seattle Convention Center, the Emerald City Comicon was swarming with thousands of devotees of fantasy, sci-fi and general all-purpose make-believe. My kind of people.
The Littlest Iron […]
January 23rd, 2011
And here’s why: life is confusing enough as it is.
Yet, obviously for some brainy writers it’s not enough for a novel to combine a plot, characterization and compelling narrative authority into a coherent whole. The challenge is to create a fictional world in which nothing is reliable – not the narrator, not the apparent […]
|
|