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The main reason I left teaching psychology is that I couldn’t go on teaching lies. When I analyzed the source of my discontent, I came up with a dim view of my chosen field, a criticism of widely held pre-theoretic … Continue reading
Category Archives: Blog
I recently saw, on DVD, Wise Blood, the movie based on a novel by Flannery O’Connor. Criterion has reissued this 1979 gem, all cleaned up, and with annotations and interviews for context. The movie increased my respect for O’Connor. I … Continue reading
I recently participated in an online writing conference offered by Backspace Writers Conference (http://www.backspacewritersconference.com/). Their conferences run four days and include six attendees from all parts of the country. This particular one focused on manuscript submission materials: a query letter … Continue reading
Terrorism used to be a strategy of violence against a civilian population for political or religious expression. A terrorist act was a “statement” by people who otherwise had no voice. It’s hard to imagine groups that literally have no voice … Continue reading
I started my fiction-writing career with mystery, which I chose precisely because it is formulaic. As a beginner, I wanted to be guided by a lot of structure. I never held the delusion that I possessed some towering talent burning to be … Continue reading
The screenplay adaptation of my detective novel came in at 93 minutes. I learned a ton. One lesson was that I am capable of taking an objective view of my own work. I slashed mercilessly. Several beloved secondary characters were … Continue reading
I am still dazed from a weekend-long sci-fi / fantasy conference, Tuscon 42. The name of it looks like a misspelling of Tucson, but it isn’t. It’s supposed to mean something like TUS (the airport designation) + CONference, hence Tuscon. Cute, … Continue reading
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