velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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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…
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17NOV22 / accessions
Bit of feminist social history, why not? Three copies, because I volunteered to do a bulk order for what will be the next title tackled by our casual book group. Hoping that reading a non-fiction piece will somewhat reduce my tendency to ramble on about technique and narratology… but based on previous form, it’s not…
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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…
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hurry up and wait
In response to a question from L____, I decided that I’m not really sure how I’m feeling at the moment—which is less due to any lack of feeling or insight, and more due to a scrum of competing feelings and concerns, some of which have hung in the balance for the better part of a…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”