Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Writing

  • the true name of the sun

    Comfort-reading A Wizard of Earthsea. Of all the books I read in my childhood, only Le Guin’s have been so reliably enriched by time, experience and re-reading. She was a worker of the same true magic she wrote of.

  • final phase

    Finally! Been a long time waiting for this to arrive, after assorted delays and mishaps. And it arrives within a few days of my hearing that Alexandra Pierce at Locus made particular mention of my piece herein (among a few others), and described it as “a powerful story on many levels”; not gonna quibble with…

  • intellectual fracking / notes toward the declaration of the Butlerian jihad

    Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake. (Lest you think I’m pretending not…

  • bashing the wordbashers

    Another one of those moments when I find myself very much in the same camp as Alan Jacobs, who is here responding to a THORT LORD bit on the future of writing in a world where AI is a thing. Part of my reaction might well be due to the THORT LORD in question, because…

  • the moment’s mercies

    A timely thing from Uncle Warren: A thing we don’t talk about enough, as writers: the myth that we write a thing by starting at the beginning and just progressing through to the end in purely linear fashion.  Very few writers do that.  The rest of us jump around in the story, write sections out…