I spoke last night to a fellow writer who admits that he hates to write–he doesn’t enjoy it at all, it’s just a compulsion. That’s a sentiment I understand (see my recent essay, on the Back Road Cafe), but it’s something I seldom experience anymore. In part, I think, because I’ve learned how to spend more time inside the dream … Read More
Monday Muse: The Sound of Gravity
The odd little audio blip in this video, from the New Yorker, is the sound of gravitational waves, released a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies away from here, when a pair of black holes collided. Those waves appeared on the screen of Marco Drago, a postdoc student, viewing data from LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), an immense … Read More
Friday Round Up: Best Thing I’ve Read All Week
“When I think about the political unconsciousness of masculinity, it’s queerness.” That’s Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz discussing masculinity, science fiction, and writing as an act of defiance, in conversation with Hilton Als, theater critic for The New Yorker, part of a series of conversations that took place at The Strand, New York’s legendary independent book store, and I’ve been thinking … Read More
Works in Progress: Relics
I’ve been drafting a new short story for the last month or so, in between revising chapters of Kublai, the science fiction novel I wrote via dictation last year. This short story is entitled either “Relics” (or “In Blackwater Woods”–I haven’t decided yet), and I’m experiencing that great creative high that comes with finishing the first draft. In part because this … Read More
