Who doesn’t like to be scared?
Okay, sure, lots of people don’t. But in case you’re not one of them, NPR has once again taken an informal and completely non-scientific poll to find the 100 Best Horror Novels And Stories. Naturally, they did it this year, 2018, since it marks the 200th anniversary of the original publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Continue reading “100 Best Horror Novels And Stories : NPR”
This month I’m writing about non-powered flight which reaches out to touch the edge of space!
Source: Glidin’ High | David Magazine
Because sometimes periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, braces, and ellipses won’t do, here’s a list of Little-Known Punctuation Marks for National Punctuation Day thanks to Mental FlossMental Floss!
A while ago, I particpated in the Kickstarter to get this statue cast and in place.
And now there’s a live webcam going so you can see it anytime.
In case your day needs a little Bowie.
I used to know the killer.
This is not a line I ever thought I’d type outside of a mystery novel, or one that I would ever utter in a straight forward, non-ironic literal way. But, as of September 10, 2018, it’s now a part of who I am and what I know. Continue reading “And Yet…”
So oftentimes I will read something I like and want to share it here on the blog. For whatever reason the mind kicks in and says “this is something which should be preserved.” So I file it away and eventually, I write up my thoughts about the link and then I set it to post. Continue reading “On Women and Speculative Fiction”
Who Are the Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction?
Tor.com blogger James Davis Nicoll asks this question and while I’m familiar and widely read in some of these folks, there are also a bunch I don’t know and a few I’ve never heard of. So here’s another set of books and authors to go on my reading list.
Jewish Federation is Rebranded as Jewish Nevada and Now Includes Northern Nevada and the Jewish Community Center.
In other words, I’m writing about the Las Vegas Jewish community!
Marie Severin, who was one of the rare female artists at Marvel from the Silver Age onward, as well as an Eisner Hall of Fame member, has died at age 89. Over at 13th dimension they have a great tribute, with links to some of her past work.
Reading a collection of short fiction from any given author is always a mixed bag. Same goes for an anthology of works by different authors centered around a certain theme or category. You might like some and some, well, they round out the collection.
But when you have a “Best of” collection, especially one curated by another well known writer or editor, well then, that’s a great way to start a good library. And that’s what Tor.com talks about in this article featuring A Survey of Some of the Best Science Fiction Ever Published (Thanks to Judy-Lynn Del Rey). While I’ve read some of these, and own several, a bunch more are going on my wish list.
“For years, photographers have traveled across Russia finding and photographing intriguing ghost towns, empty Soviet factories, toppling houses, and crumbling churches.”
For me, though, it’s really more about just finding cool, funky, unique places to spark the imagination and speculate on what kind of stories could be set there.
“Back in 2001, 65 of the world’s leading comic book artists illustrated a deck of playing cards to raise money for the British charity Childline, as part of the 2001 Comics Festival in Bristol.”
I had no idea about this, but as it combines my love of comics and my love of playing cards, I felt it was something I needed to let others know about. The whole story, Card Sharp: flashback to when Comic Creators delivered some ace playing card art for Childline, along with images of all the cards, is here courtesy of downthetubes.net and it’s great. It’s been 17 years since this happened and needs to happen again.
“Fifty years ago, an up-and-coming creator named Marv Wolfman turned in his first script, and though no one knew it at the time, the DC Universe was about to be changed forever.”
I first met Marv Wolfman in 1983, when he was a relative newcomer, having only been in the biz for about 15 years, and I was a 16 year old punk.
Since then, we’ve been friendly, we’ve broken bread and hung out and shared a number of laughs.
And he is defintely one of the formative writing voices of my own work.
Evidently, I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Recently, I was asked by the Baltic Summer University to give a lecture about how I ended up in Lithuania. I titled the lecture Stranger in a Strange Land: How I went from All-American to part-time Lithuanian. That picture to the left is from the talk.
This was all well and good until it came time to actually start to put the lecture together and I realized I didn’t really know what I was going to talk about for 90 minutes. I mean come on, even if you had Neil Armstrong come in for a lecture, he probably didn’t talk more than 60, and he actually did something important (although, if you ask him, it weren’t no big thing). Continue reading ““So there was this girl…””
So for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been teaching an intensive filmmaking class for the Baltic Summer University. The class itself had gone through various permutations, since this was the first time it was being offered (and so, it stands to reason, my first time teaching it). Originally, the plan was to have the students break into two groups, with half making a scripted film and the other half doing a documentary. With only 5 students, however, that wasn’t going to work. Add in that four of the five were really interested in documentary work and we changed plans on the fly, eventually deciding that each of them would make their own 5 minute documentary. Continue reading “Baltic Summer University and the birth of documentarians…”
Getting the Hang of Thursdays 