I recently attended a “pitch” conference for a week at a charming seaside town on the coast of California. Morro Bay is a fishing village and a tourist trap, stereotypically picturesque and aggressively insular, but like all such small towns, … Continue reading
My Galaxy 42mm black “smartwatch” was a fun toy, but I took it back after two weeks. Best Buy made the refund easy, no questions asked. That’s one reason I bought it there. Also they had the best extended warranty, which … Continue reading
Careers have been built on mining the depths of The Great Gatsby, that most iconic of American novels. I recently read it for the third time to see what I could learn about the craft of writing. I decided to stay close … Continue reading
Finally, my new site featuring my psi-fi books is up. (www.psifibooks.com). That’s one brick in place for my nascent publishing empire. “Psi-fi” is pronounced the same as “sci-fi” but psi-fi focuses on psychological fiction in a technological world. How is human psychology … Continue reading
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is famous for cribbing the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The ‘king’ (Edgar’s father) is murdered by his brother Claude (Claudius) who then beds the father’s wife, Trudy (Gertrude). Edgar is the half-mad prince who accidentally … Continue reading
The title refers to Matthew-13 of the Christian Bible, a parable in which a sower scatters seeds indiscriminately. Some grow, some don’t, depending on where they fall. A preacher (e.g., Jesus) is analogous to the sower; sometimes his words fall … Continue reading
New Book Review I’ve reorganized my “psi-fi” site (www.psi-fi.net): “Psychological Fiction in a Technology World.” That’s where I review sci-fi books by the standards of psi-fi, a genre I made up. It’s about exploring the nature of human consciousness and … Continue reading
I just returned from a writer’s conference in San Francisco (https://sfwriters.org/), which was a decent conference with fairly high-level sessions, not Bonehead 101 as so many of them are. I had four days in the Mark Hopkins hotel at the … Continue reading
I never paid too much attention to the details of Darwinian theory before I read this book. I assumed, as many do, that the basic ideas are sound. The offspring of any animal vary in traits (blue vs brown eyes, … Continue reading
I bought a “Google Home” voice-activated speaker (VAS) that uses Google Assistant, a synthetic voice that answers questions. Google Assistant is comparable to Siri, Cortana, and especially Alexa, the persona on Amazon’s “Echo” line of voice-activated speakers. For all of … Continue reading
This is a very British tale by a very British author, an acquired taste, I believe. You must appreciate understatement and dry wit to find it engaging, and you also must be able to bulldoze past a mind-numbing batch of … Continue reading