We have a salad vending machine at work. It was the cause of some excitement. “It’s like magic!” a co-worker said. “Robots making salad!” Except, every morning, a cafeteria worker was dicing up the ingredients to the machine’s specifications, and another worker came and filled the machine and cleaned it. Read more…
“How do you get it all done?” someone asked me recently, and she wasn’t the first. “I want to see your daily routine, learn your secrets.” I gape around my messy desk, my ever-increasing to-do list, and marvel. Every day, I faff about on the internet, procrastinate, and lay on Read more…
Blog topic suggested by Ticana Zhu When we talk about “Killing your darlings” in fiction, what we mean is realizing that a particular phrase, paragraph, or scene is not, in fact, working with the story, no matter how much you love it. You have to cut it for the good Read more…
I never imagined being this old. Does anyone? Let’s take a retrospective through the Big birthdays: When I turned 20 I was a sophomore in college and depressed. I had failed, utterly, to enjoy my teenaged years properly, I was sure of that. I was single and sure I’d die Read more…
You might wonder why I spend so much time going to science fiction conventions. Is it really worth the entrance fee, the driving, the exhaustion, to talk about science fiction all weekend long with various fellow-nerds? I mean… YES. But there’s more to it than that. Networking If you want Read more…
My dear friend and a fantastic author and mathematician, Ursula Whitcher, is launching her first short story collection, North Continent Ribbon as part of Neon Hemlock’s 2024 novella series. Ursula is quiet and casual and unassuming, just as she was when I met her at an SCA meeting when she Read more…
Expletives are a shorthand for emotion, and modern American speech is peppered with them. I tried to remove “god” from my vocabulary a few years ago, since, as an atheist, I felt I was being disingenuous. I started saying “Gort” because I thought it was funny. You know, the super-powerful Read more…