Tag: science fiction
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Canyon of Dreams
If you dig it, they will come. In the early 1900s, the Union Rock Company excavated a tunnel through the base of a mountain in what was then called Brush Canyon. Their intent was to extract rock to pave the streets of LA. What they left behind was something more enduring. Over the years, the…
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Putting Together A Short Fiction Collection
You’ve been writing stories. Some have appeared in magazines and anthologies. A few are still making the rounds. And a few more—possibly the best of the lot—don’t seem to be a good fit for the current markets. But one thing’s for sure. You’ve got enough for a collection. So what do you do? Next week,…
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Writing & Resilience
Later this morning, I’m leaving for Milford, the town where Damon Knight, James Blish, and Virginia Kidd helped establish science fiction as a respected literary genre and where The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency still operates out of Kidd’s former residence. Blish and Kidd dubbed their residence Arrowhead, and during the 1960s it served as a…
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Writing in Private
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” So said Ernest Hemingway when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1954. And yet, a few decades earlier (according to his recollections in A Moveable Feast) he wrote many of his short stories in public—surrounded by (and occasionally taking inspiration from) the strangers who came and went as…
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On a Night in November…
Shelley’s “Hideous Progeny” Comes Alive“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” So begins the creation scene in the book that The Guardian calls one of the top 10 novels of all time. And this November, that scene and more will come alive as Prime Stage Theatre premieres the first production…
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Today at Confluence:
Where To Next? Trends in Science FictionWriting horror in the days of covid is a bit like living in a science fiction novel. Not the Michael Crichton variety, where things pretty much go back to normal after humankind deals with the inciting incident, but the Richard Matheson kind (think I am Legend) where things change and those of us who get…