Something happened today that really pissed me off, and I thought it might be an object lesson in how to make potential customers/readers/friends very angry. First off I should say, I get a lot of spam, especially stuff that is publishing and SEO related. None of it has a particular Read more…
Everyone who’s been paying attention and has mere than a passing affection for freedom of speech knows that Internet culture is getting out of hand. Especially at times, it seems, in the little corner of the net inhabited by Science Fiction fans. (Perennial case being YA Twitter, of which I’ve Read more…
Well last night I found out I had been hacked. Some anal abscess of a semi-human decided to inject a phishing page on my domain. A nice person (Canadian, natch) e-mailed me to tell me. He actually looked at my domain and decided that it didn’t seem the home of Read more…
I’ve published a longish gest blog over at Sara Hoyt’s page. It’s about the pathological targeting of young debut authors in the Twitterverse. Please go check it out. By now you probably all know the story of Amélie Wen Zhao and her book Blood Heir. She was a new rising Read more…
It has been a while since I’ve done a rant about plagiarism. It’s one of the more corrosive bits of self-destruction writers engage in. It might be envy, or laziness or something deep-seated and broken in the writer’s psyche, but in most cases I’ve heard of, the plagiarist is compulsive Read more…
So a few days ago Slate published an article in what has become a distressingly common subgenre we could call “People are writing SF wrong! Here’s what we must do to fix it!” It seems to have been inspired by an earlier article in Vox about “Hopepunk,” a nascent literary movement whose Read more…
In a political discourse, if someone isn’t trying to debate, they’re attempting to exercise power. That is where a large fraction of American political life has gone off the rails. It’s there in comment threads all the time; where one person attempts to have a rational discussion, and the other screams Read more…
I wrote about the morality of fiction earlier, a couple of things I’ve read recently brought me back to the question from the another side. In that post I was talking about morality of fiction in light of the inner processes of the author. But really, when most people talk Read more…
There are some people out there in desperate need of a reality check. Right now, progressives are certain that, somehow, the country that elected Obama twice has suddenly become a cesspit of sexism, racism and misogyny. The angst is so over-the-top that my progressive Facebook friends are sounding like all Read more…
This election is remarkable in that whoever wins will be absolutely loathed by a plurality of the populace, and distrusted by a majority. It is quite possible that on inauguration day our president elect will have underwater approval ratings. If there is any state out there that splits by less Read more…