Sex and violence, like romance and suspense, are just ingredients. Not every meal requires every ingredient you enjoy, and some are actually damaged quite severely by the introduction of ingredients that have no place there. Mrs. Cropley’s famous peanut butter & anchovis sandwiches are an example. On the other hand, sometimes strange combinations work amazingly well […]
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The Book, the ‘Zine, the Net and their Authors
This article first appeared in FANG Vol. 1 in 2005.
There was once a time, just between the rise of the fast-food, fast-everything economy in the West in the seventies and the flourishing of the modern Internet in the ‘90s, when the distribution of one’s art through amateur media was possible, although it wasn’t easy. The availability of […]
All a Matter of Perspective
I’ve been quite unfair, in this series (of which this installment is the last) in sketching a Jekyll & Hyde scenario of the Writer vs the Not Writer, because we’re all a bit of both. At different times, for different reasons. There’s a sliding scale between one and the other, see. The goal of these […]
I Can’t Write Under These Conditions
Like many authors, Roald Dahl had a special space in which he did his writing. Dahl’s cluttered and dilapidated hut bears all the hallmarks of such spaces: privacy, comfort and focus.
One problem with a creative mind, to put it diplomatically, is that it is a problem-solving machine which is very difficult to selectively turn off. Many […]
I had it destroyed
I’m a New Media guy, and as such I’m heavily biased in matters digital. I feel that in the 21st century, in which a common telephone can have enough storage capacity to contain all the text in even the greatest public libraries on Earth, when you can have Internet access every moment of the day, […]
Always a Bridesmaid
“I have it all worked out in my head.”
This is where the divide between Not Writers and Writers is thinnest: Story Ideas.
Creativity, at its core, is a misnomer. We don’t actually create anything new, because we’re not capable of inventing anything we don’t already comprehend: we can’t conceive of something we can’t conceive of. The actual definition […]
No Time to Write
“I have this cool idea for a story, but I won’t have time to write it until after finals.”
This is a perfectly legitimate thing to say if finals are next week, but not if they’re in five months. Stress, health problems, uncertainty at work or at home, children — all of these are legitimate distractions […]
Writer’s Block
Imagine the scene. Hip youngsters, well-read and literate all, lounging in a diner or cafe and discussing, over steamingly exquisite coffee, the pain of their writer’s block. How their prose is stunted, their characters mute, the well of their inspiration dry and dusty. Sophisticated music plays in the background, providing a mellow undertone to their […]
Knotcast Presents: X (I’m on a podcast, yo!)
Couple weeks ago a bunch of the authors who worked on Sofawolf’s upcoming anthology X (www.kyellgold.com/x) recorded a roundtable podcast to promote the book and to generally have a good time. And now it’s been released on Knotcast!
Since then, Fuzzwolf has spent considerable time and effort engineering together the various sources, recorded across […]
X: “I am the Lord thy God”
Sometimes you hear about a project that’s just so damn juicy, so damn succulent, that it’sutterly irresistible. You find yourself watering at the mouth for it even before it starts. That’s how I felt when Kyell Gold from Sofawolf Press approached me about contributing a story to a little project he was cooking up, named […]
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