So we’ve cracked the code on DNA and life expectancy is racheting up greatly in the developed countries. Will we all end up a bunch of geriatrics in our nineties or past the century mark dealing with a host of other issues our predecessors did not have to concern themselves with: losing control of bodily …
I enter the House of Words every day to find the appropriate ones that describe my stories. These stories come as pictures in my head, snapshots that fade no sooner they appear, like dreams. My job is to run after these illusive images with a quiver of memory arrows and shoot them down, sticking them …
I read to reach beyond myself; to tap into the collective consciousness of writers greater than me. I read so that their ideas, techniques and styles will rub off and enleaven my own writing. I read to discover new words, and for new ways of employing words. I read for my own education, with the …
A writer once went out into the fields of imagination and created an animal with a lion’s roar, a giraffe’s neck, a cheetah’s speed, and a horse’s gait; he gave it the vegan diet of an elephant, the conceit of a cat and the faithfulness of a dog. The animal, which the writer decided to …
A colleague of mine recently wrote to me that that members of her American family are debating the issue of that nation’s collective guilt over the Iraqi war. In Canada, federal politicians apologized last month on behalf of our collective guilt over the treatment of First Nations peoples in residential schools. Reparations were made in …
I find mashups on the web are like plotting a story. You could take different dynamic webpages, cut and rearrange them into a brand new master web page that refreshes continuosly as its components change and update. Similarly, I could take the daily newspaper, cut out all the juicy news items (man robs bank, woman …
Many exiting political leaders, whether through retirement or being voted out of office ( or deposed, exiled, overthrown • as extreme forms of replacement) tend to write their memoirs soon afterwards, as if trying to capture that lost glory of being numero uno, as if wanting to expose the bad people and systems that led …
With all the material available in blogs, self•publishing, memoirs, e•mail, instant messenger and other formats • there appears to be more writers than readers. Shrinking leisure hours due to the 24×7 work week restricts time for reading even further; and when you have to factor in time to read blogs and e•mail and instant messenger …
Writing comes in bursts of anxiety, like those pangs of mortality that strike us every time someone known to us dies. What if it is me the next time? Gee I’d better write it all down for my progeny before its too late. But the images and experiences that accumulate and get stored in this …
I recently received some editorial feedback that two linked short stories would be better extended into a novel. Taking that feedback to heart I have been cranking out an average of 10 pages a day over the last three weeks. And yes, the plotline is still intact, with plenty more room for character development, sub•plot …