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I started reading Spook Country last night before bed, the first chapter of which ends with a virtual world/real-world mashup that has the main character standing in front of the Viper Room in LA looking down at a dead River Phoenix on the sidewalk in front of her. Leaving aside a whole other post I [...]

I missed this earlier: Tim Wu’s J.K. Rowling’s Dark Mark: For reasons anthropologists will someday understand, volunteer encyclopedias have become the place to find what passes for our collective wisdom. Wikipedia is the clearest example: It may be wrong sometimes, but it is nonetheless a statement as to what we know. To her credit, Rowling [...]

So J.K. Rowling has opted to sue one of her fans. Steve Van Der Ark started compiling his Harry Potter Lexicon as a labour of love in 1999, keeping track of people, places, things, magical monsters, spells, and historical people in a kind of running encyclopedia of all things Potter, updated each time a new [...]

I took myself out for dinner tonight and read Good Bones by Margaret Atwood, one of my favourites that I had clearly lent out to someone at some point, because I failed to have a copy until Jeremy was in town a few months ago and I picked one up at a used bookstore on [...]

April is poetry month, so the local morning radio show had a poet on to read some of her poetry. I’m not going to mention any names, but the poems and the discussion of them annoyed me so much that I had to shout at my radio and then get out of bed to rant [...]

So it goes. Details here. Someone please stop this week, I want to get off.

I’m not entirely sure how to spin this story. Disney is replacing Christopher Robin with a girl. I mean, on one hand, I’m a big fan of taking elements of popular culture and throwing them in the blender. I like the idea that fictional worlds are open; we can always wander into Wonderland and tinker [...]

It amazes me what you can learn by starting to write something. While I’m trying to very hard to plot carefully, and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about big plot elements and moving things around and being as clear as I can be with myself about everyone’s motives, still the discovery method [...]

18,701 / 100,000(18.7%) Today I looked at a variety of pages cataloguing the typical cliches of the fantasy genre (which, somewhat inexplicibly, I find myself writing). These included The Grand List of Fantasy CLiches and The Not So Grand Cliche List. These are amusing, but also instructive, of course. I am of two minds about [...]

A one star review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, as posted on Amazon.com: I bought these books to have something nice to read to my grandkids. I had to stop, however, because the books are nothing more than advertisements for “Turkish Delight,” a candy popular in the U.K. The [...]