Category: Randoms & My Life
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Top Couples in Fiction, Breaking the Rules of Novel-Writing, Killing Off the Printed Book – All Discussed Here at Stories and Stuff in 2012!
It’s not quite the new year yet, but let’s get this up before all of the Christmas business take over: Top 5 Literary Couples Here’s a secret – any time you put ‘top five’ or ‘top ten’ in your title you increase the likelihood that people will find and read it. I don’t use this trick…
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Slow Blogging, And Why You Should Blog Less
This post was planned to be an announcement of Stories and Stuff going down to one post a week for the next month or two, to give my blogging muscles a rest and to focus on fiction writing a bit more. Well, think of my surprise when I came across this slow blogging manifesto. Author…
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Who Says I’m Qualified to Contribute to Academic Conversation?
So I am in middle of writing a twenty-page paper about Woodstock, which means my writing muscle is pretty occupied right now. (Though seriously, the organizational disaster that was Woodstock is an incredibly interesting topic, and it’s worth reading and laughing about sometime. 400,000 hippies hanging out in the mud, with almost no food and…
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Happy Birthday, Dracula!
I’ve been sick as a dog all week, with some kind of cold which plugs up my head and leaves me unable to think very clearly. However, I can’t leave Stories and Stuff without some kind of post on Friday, can I? So I’ll just note that yesterday was Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday, and Bram…
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A Call to Creativity
What do the pyramids, the MineCraft Earth, and my short stories all have in common? Hopefully they’re not all insane projects, though piling virtual block on top of virtual block inside a video game is only slightly weirder than piling actually physical blocks into a tall, pointy shape. They’re all made by people, of course.…
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There Will Be Superheroes
A call to abolish them is completely misguided The other day I came across this article, which reviews the claim of film critic David Denby that our society needs rescuing from our obsession with superheroes, and that the movie business never will be mature and realistic until it stops focusing on fantasies like these. As…
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No Such Thing as Creativity
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 1:9 According to this article in Slate, a wave of critics are asserting there never was any such thing as creativity, genius or innovation, and that everything new is merely…
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Why Writers Should Take a History Degree
“Take journalism,” people will advise young, aspiring writers who feel they should go to university to get a degree in something. “You’ll learn more about writing, and get a practical job out of it too.” Clearly this was not advice I took, or could take, since none of the colleges around where I live offered…
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Is it a Language or a Cultural Problem?
“A speaker of variety A who is dismayed or annoyed because speakers of variety B do not talk like the folks back home does not have a linguistic problem but a cultural one, which can only be solved if one is genuinely willing to work to develop the ability – which does not come naturally…
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Surviving a Language Immersion, in 3 Steps
I write about languages because I’m interested in them. So yes, this post is kind of a general interest post, rather than a writing post, but I will start by putting in a plug for writers to learn a little of the languages of the countries they are writing about. After all, you wouldn’t want…
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