Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into […]
The Use of Lubricant Read More »
…and do you really care? That’s a question I’ve been mulling over the last week or so. I read an article in a fiction-writing how-to book a while ago, and they emphasized the need for specificity when writing descriptions. The example they used was The trees were green. They suggested that a better way to
Is it an Uzi or a Timberwolf? Read More »
What are the facts? Again and again and again-what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”–what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts
Care Not What the Neighbors Think Read More »
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that I’m just a little bit in awe of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein – for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he’s one of a microscopic collection of authors who can make me cry. Heinlein had
This was going to be a simple Mash post, but it ended up I had so much to say about AuthorEarnings.com, I turned it into a dedicated post just on the tornado that is ripping through the publishing world. A few weeks ago, super-sonically successful indie author Hugh Howey (author of Wool, amongst others) launched a
The Shot Heard Around the Publishing World Read More »
While short hair for men is the fashion right now in the early half of the twenty-first century, I can’t help but bewail the diminishing numbers of heroes with long hair. When did it stop being sexy? In Romanceland, heroes throughout history and into the realms of the paranormal have enjoyed long locks for decades.
Where Did All The Long-Haired Heroes Go? Read More »
The United States’ Constitution, that guarantees certain civil liberties, fascinates me from an historical and outsider’s perspective. In particular, the Constitution grants “freedom from slavery and forced labour”. I imagine many people glide right over that statement, barely giving a thought to how powerful a shield it really is. Canada has a Canadian Charter of
Slave Labour. It’s Not Just For The History Books. Read More »
May You Live In Interesting Times You may not like vampires in your fiction because of the blood sucking and the biting…and well, you may just simply be sick of them. They’re everywhere in romance these days, and they’re endlessly sexy and often omnipotent. But I continue to write about them because of their
May You Live In Interesting Times Read More »
There was a spitwad fight over on another blog site the other day. A reader who returns 55% of all the books that she buys from Amazon was upset because Amazon suspended her return privileges. Lots of readers and writers picked that up and ran with it. I won’t link to the site, because the
The Case for Slow Reading Read More »
The Story Behind Terror Stash The smart answer is: Why not? There’s been stranger places that quite excellent thriller have been set in, including runaway best sellers. A classic that springs to mind is Running Blind, a 1970s espionage novel by English thriller writer Desmond Bagley, which was set in Iceland. Not only did the
Why Set a Thriller in Western Australia? Read More »