Help with some great SF novel openings?

Tonight, at the Arlington Writers Group, we are doing an exercise on “beginnings”. The idea is for each person to read the opening page or so of a novel and then the group will discuss why it does or does not work. Being a science fiction writer, I am wont to choose a good science [...]

NPR: The best 100 science fiction & fantasy books

NPR is asking people to vote for the best 100 science fiction & fantasy books ever written. SF&F people are encouraging everyone to go and vote; we are trying to top the 17,000 votes that thrillers got last year. I just finished posting my top 5. And just so that you don’t have to drill [...]

Blog on IDrive: Cloud backups and peace of mind

I have been using IDrive since the fall of 2009 as a means for securely backing up all of my data, and while I’ve posted about it before, I’ve never really done so in detail. But it is worth blogging about because it is, in my mind, the perfect solution for data backups*. When people [...]

“Hindsight, In Neon” over at BestScienceFictionStories

The folks over at BestScienceFictionStories.com have posted a summary and some thoughts on my story, “Hindsight, In Neon”. This story originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Apex Magazine. It was later reprinted in the Apex anthology, Descended From Darkness, Vol 1.

Feed your writer’s block

From time-to-time, I get into a rut where it seems like nothing I write is any good. This can be self-propagating. You write more and it feels worse, so you write even more and that seems even worse. In reality, it isn’t. When this happens to me, however, writing doesn’t seems as fun as it [...]

Tumblr

In an effort to expand my social network, I am now relaying my blog posts to my¬†Tumblr site. I’m not exactly sold on Tumblr as an interface for blogging, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a presence there. For now, all the posts from this blog are automatically relayed there, just as they [...]

Humor for a Tuesday morning

Tuesdays seem like they are neglected, so I decided to post something funny in honor of the fact that it is Tuesday. (And in truth, seeing my high school class group revived on Facebook spurred the idea.) So without further delay, here is a picture of yours truly, taken in either the fall of 1989 [...]

So long, AOPA

After being a member of Airplane Owner and Pilot’s Association for more than 12 years, today I finally got around to canceling my membership. I first joined AOPA when I started seriously considering taking flying lessons in the early summer of 1999. Of course, I began my lessons later that summer and got my license [...]

They became spacemen: a science fictional story of a small gas station in the Bronx

Sometime last week, I had a dream that I was explaining to someone where my grandfather’s service station was in the Bronx. My grandpa, along with four of his brothers, owned and operated a gas station in the Bronx for somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 years. They finally sold the business in 1985. The [...]

SF Signal podcast #59: Science fiction series that deserve the HBO treatment

In SF Signal‘s podcast #59, a number of panelists, including me, are asked the question: “What science fiction series deserves the HBO 10-episode-per-book treatment?” There are so many interesting answers that I am going to have to listen to the podcast, despite having been in it myself. There wasn’t time for me to jot down [...]

Father’s Day

The Little Man and Kelly let me sleep in this morning and didn’t come waking me up until 8:30am! That was a pleasant little Father’s Day present. Due to the fact that the Little Man’s birthday falls just before Father’s Day, this turns out to be my third Father’s Day, as opposed to my second. [...]

Retiring the iMac

I took advantage of the quiet day today (I was giving a “day off” for Father’s Day) in order to do some stuff around the house. One of the things I’d been wanting to do for some time now is retire my iMac. With the iPad, the new home sharing technology, and a fix for [...]

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