Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Writing

  • Notes toward an MFA creative writing module

    INTERVIEWER: Do you really think creative writing can be taught? VONNEGUT: About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing. And somewhat less flippantly: VONNEGUT: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned…

  • The old ones are the good ones

    Or at least this person thinks so. An anonymous book collector turned blogger is writing posts about titles from their (apparently quite capacious and varied) library, which includes a copy of Fables from the Fountain from Newcon Press, which just so happens to contain my first properly published short story. Quoth said blogger: One of…

  • A crude intrusion into someone else’s fantasies

    Found material might be “evidence” –might even be a direct, indexical sign of a thing that happened–but the thing that happened, the life that contained it, can’t be reassembled, or back-engineered into existence. It’s only what it is now: if you try to glue the fragments together with the sentiments “evoked” in you, all you…

  • Nominations and nominality

    Quoth the redoubtable Nicholas Whyte: This is a very well done and well executed piece of work, and I really enjoyed reading it and can understand why people nominated it. However it is clearly a work of fiction, so I won’t vote for it at all in the Best Non-Fiction category. Well, it’s clearly not a…

  • More dreams, fewer pipes

    I get published, y’know. Now, I announced the release of the Noir anthology from Newcon Press aaaages ago, but the world of reviewing moves pretty slowly when it happens off-line, and only now has this incredibly flattering write-up of my story “A Boardinghouse Heart” made it onto the hallowed pages of Vector, courtesy of the mighty Martin…