Spec Tech: The Statistics of Immortality

The world is riddled with thousand-year-old vampires.  Okay, maybe not, but books are.  You know what bothers me most about thousand-year-old vampires?  Their uneven distribution along a chart plotting them by their ages.  (I also dislike their repressive misogynistic and anti-Semitic worldviews—those thousand year-old vampires are jerks—but first, we’ll talk about their ages.) There are……

Writing Prompt #23 Crunch it Down

I just reduced a 7,000 word story to 3,000 words and made it better. At the start, I didn’t believe it was possible but this was the only plausible story to use and the opportunity called for a 3,000 submission. “What harm can it do to try?” I thought. Here’s the original opening: Amel’s face……

Spec Tech: Talking to Insects

I enjoyed Chris Doty’s August 26 blog on Linguistic Quirkiness. In that spirit, and coming from my own biological bent, I’d like to consider some zoological approaches to communication. No, I’m not going to interrogate the whole animal world here, but restrict myself to just a couple of insects. I want to consider how insects……

Clarion Writing Prompt #22 Twitter Wisdom

About a year ago I decided to start twittering tidbits from my Okal Rel Saga by working through the books a page a day.  The results are at http://twitter.com/#!/okalrelsrv. At first I found the exercise frustrating and wondered if it was worthwhile, but it became a ritual so I stuck with it. Each day I……

Spec Tech: Inner Sense Cultivation

In my last blog, I said that magicians needed training—non-fictional human ones, anyway. That training involves what I call “inner sense cultivation,” the deliberate practice of imagined perception, in which someone sets out to see, hear, feel and even to smell and taste that which is in the mind and not in the world. It……