Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Writing

  • 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…

  • don’t tell me what to do, show me

    Adam Roberts responds here to a tweet by Tade Thompson which (to be very reductive) argues for a full reversal of the old “show, don’t tell” edict, beating up on which seems to have become something of a shibboleth of the online writing community in recent times. In his sometimes Bartleby-ish way, Roberts rejects this…

  • stories and possibilities are always multiple, infinite

    Wonderful essay here at LitHub by Ellie Robins. I was sold from this moment: The truth is, there can be no such thing as a monomyth. Stories are alive, and like all living beings, they exist in ecosystems. In the living world, a monoculture always spells death. Ellie Robins https://lithub.com/how-to-go-home-on-resisting-a-very-english-heros-journey/ TFW someone totally nails, with…