Stealing Bellows
A microfiction.
Replace “Gen. Brutus” with “Gen. Petraeus”
From US Army War College Quarterly - Winter 1992 issue’s The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012: “A military coup has taken place in the United States–the year is 2012–and General Thomas E. T. Brutus, Commander-in-Chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the United States, now occupies the White House as permanent Military [...]
Damn! This is some good news blow!
From Chuck Klosterman’s A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century: “Chuck Klosterman issues his predictions for the coming century. Featuring robot wars, near annihilation, and President Tom Brady.”
Creating A Complex Character
As I mentioned last week, I am teaching a class in short-story writing this semester entitled Once & Again: A Workshop in Creative Revision. This week’s class was relatively uneventful, from an outside perspective. If you had shown up in the middle of it, you would have seen five students (and one dashingly handsome teacher) [...]
Listening to the Last Person on Earth
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, is an experimental novel about the last human being on the planet. It is devoid of a story in any traditional sense, being more a fictional woman’s meditation on the intertextuality of culture, where Helen and Paris and Vincent Van Gogh have just as much—if not more—reality than the woman’s [...]
Ablution: A play
[This is the result of a writer's prompt given during my residency at Goddard. It's a revised first draft (not quite second draft). I may rework it later into a short-story.]
A hospital delivery room. One set of swinging doors with windows in them at eye level.
In the hot seat, CLARICE, a one-armed white girl, early [...]
Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard
All you interface fanboys gotta check out Daring Fireball’s An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard.
How Much Does History Weigh?
Nevil Shute’s novel, On The Beach, begins in Australia on December 27, 196-, which is already sometime after nuclear war has eradicated humanity from the Northern Hemisphere. The novel ends the following year, sometime in late August or early September, when the fallout finally arrives on the southernmost-inhabited continent and kills off the only human [...]
Cell Phones & Fiction
From Call Me, Ishmael: “Lately I’ve come around…to the realization that cellphones, while they might have their uses in what we are pleased to call “real life†(though I’m still to come to a final verdict on that), are nothing but an albatross around the neck of any writer who wants to tell a story. [...]
What Happened Up On Eight
[Here's the result of another writing prompt given out by my advisor -- oh I didn't tell you all who he is: His name's Kyle Bass, and I heard his stuff yesterday, and my god, is he a damn fine writer! I can't tell you how lucky I am to be working with the guy. [...]
