Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Writing

  • it’s too big and they are a lot harder to play than they look

    I wouldn’t describe myself as a Nick Cave fan; I know far too many folk who are deeply into one or more of his various phases of work to claim that I’m anything more than aware of his position in the cultural landscape. (It probably dates me pretty clearly if I note that, for me,…

  • changing phases

    I seem to have gotten myself published again, in the fiction qua fiction domain*. Talk about TOC imposter syndrome… I had no idea I’d be appearing alongside that roster of names! (Click through above to see it in full, but it includes Corey J White, Eugen Bacon, Paolo Bacigalupi, Greg Egan, Simon Sellars, Cat Sparks,…

  • thoughts on (academic) writing

    Not mine, to be clear—I still think of myself as woefully underqualified to advise on academic writing, even more so than the other sorts of writing I do—but rather Dave Beer’s thoughts on academic writing. I like that he’s at pains to frame them as thoughts, rather than as rules, or even tips; writing advice…

  • haunted by (hopeful) futures

    The great pleasure of following Adam Roberts’s blogging—once you’ve gotten past the minor frustration of finding that he’s upped sticks and moved to another domain and/or platform for whatever he’s currently driven to write about—is watching him try out ideas, throw together a hypothesis, then start poking it to see if it holds up. Latest…

  • the influence of anxiety

    Fredric Jameson, clearing his throat before a long piece (from 2007) on the half-centennial of Garcia Garquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude: Influence is not a kind of copying, it is permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you…