Letters of Note has letters from Phillip K. Dick to the FBI and the county sheriff’s office about plots by Neo-Nazis to insert coded phrases into Science Fiction. He even claimed that Thomas Disch’s book Camp Concentration had some of these phrases. Phillip, of course, was not well and was probably schizophrenic. (He was never […]
Wanderings
Resources for Science Fiction: Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. – Ray Bradbury
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Weasel Word Detector
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
I wrote a Weasel Word Detector. This finds those vague and empty words and phrases in your prose and highlights them in red. The results when I run my stories through it are sobering. Weasel Word Detector. I just added an Adverb Detector using the same code. I also added a detector for theLake Superior […]
Sold a story
Friday, July 16, 2010
My Science Fiction story about murder at Carnevale in Venice, Italy has been accepted by Tyree Campbell at SamsDot publishing. It will be out June 2011. I’ll just have to wait.
Heinlein Biography
Friday, July 16, 2010
There once was a time that I would watch the magazine racks and the bookstores for new works by Robert A. Heinlein. He is gone now, but I keep watching for news. His estate occasionally finds treasures like his lost novel or an outline of an unwritten story, and I always buy and read these. […]
MERGILI harp-amp “The Amphibian”
Thursday, July 15, 2010
This is what I want for Christmas. Start looking now. (I’ve decided to break out my harmonicas and start playing again.) YouTube – MERGILI harp-amp “The Amphibian”.
When Science Fiction Goes Bad
Thursday, July 15, 2010
This is a paragraph from Rockets In Ursa Major, by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. Fred Hoyle was an astronomer and science writer who did a lot of work for the SF Magazines in the Golden Era of SF. He even wrote some SF. He was not a bad writer. He probably knew better, but […]
Why Some of My Best Stories Will Never be Written
Thursday, July 15, 2010
I saw the following cartoon and thought, “What a great story idea!”, and then I had to stop myself. What is obvious to me is gibberish to you. First, IP Address is like your computer’s phone number. It is how the world sees your computer and how you can find other computers. Second, the 192.168/16 […]
I write like Stephen King?????
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
No matter how many times I run this, it tells me that I write like Stephen King. I’ve tried three different stories in different styles, yet it comes back the same. Long paragraphs, dialog, description, action – Stephen King. I can only conclude that it tells everyone that they write like Stephen King. I write […]