I have 11 minutes of screenplay written for my adaptation of Desert Justice, a cop novel I recently completed. So far, writing it has been an amazing learning experience. I can already see how the novel needs to be reorganized. … Continue reading
I just completed a revision of my detective novel, Desert Justice, and it was major surgery. I took out 5,000 words, dropping the word count to a mere 70,000. Was the detective really so flabby that there were 5K words … Continue reading
Ex Machina Writer and Director: Alex Garland Stars: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac I read the screenplay for this movie while I was writing my own AI-android story, The Newcomer. There are similarities. The main questions are, what distinguishes a human from … Continue reading
Life at the Bottom of the Food Chain The images and details in this novel are haunting. They linger in the mind days after you’re done reading. To me, that’s a sign of good writing. Here are some passages with the … Continue reading
I just returned from a local book fair where I sat behind a table and greeted walkers-by, most of whom were other authors in the hall taking a break. Very few civilian customers from outside the hermetic literary world were … Continue reading
The Economist had an interesting series of articles recently on great unsolved mysteries of science including the nature of time, what is dark matter, and the one that interested me most, consciousness: What is it? Where is it? How do we … Continue reading
I just returned from the movie, The Martian, with Matt Damon. I dreaded seeing it because I was disappointed with the book. But I considered it research, part of my self-education into the world of sci-fi. The movie is about … Continue reading
One reason I enjoy the Arizona Mystery Writers’ monthly meeting is the variety of expert speakers who help us write imaginative and realistic stories. See (www.arizonamysterywriters.com). This week, a captain from the county sheriff’s department will give a talk on … Continue reading
One’s personal viewpoint, constrained as it is by embodiment in time and location, is necessarily only one way of seeing things. Fortunately, we are capable of abstraction and generalization, so we can imagine viewpoints other than our own, and even, … Continue reading
I found myself reading the Garbanzo Gazette, official organ of the Silver City Co-op, while enjoying a mushroom and feta quiche with sweet-potato crust. I learned that most coops struggle with the Diet Coke Dilemma: customers request that soda when … Continue reading