In my experience, the hardest part of NaNoWriMo - and all writing in general, really - is getting past the endless mental hurdles and simply starting to write, every day. That's it. It's very, very easy to get caught up in all the reasons not to sit down and create new sentences on any given day. And [...]
A Princess of Mars
If you've read a science fiction book or seen a sci-fi movie, odds are you have some familiarity with Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars even if you don't know it. Published almost one hundred years ago (1917), A Princess of Mars is a classic pulp adventure story and its DNA flows through the veins of [...]
Feel What You Hear
It was once suggested to me that we will spend the rest of our lives loving the music we listened to in our youths more than anything else that we will ever hear. And that may be true. But I disagree with the presented rationale. The presenter of this argument, let's call him Tim, claimed [...]
The End Is Near
Well, not literally. But the end of the year? Yes. Very near, indeed. Which means that it's time to start putting together year-end lists of favorite books and albums, a task that I always intend to fly quickly through only to then spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over. My intent this year is to [...]
A Boy and A Bear In A Boat
When Dave Shelton named A Boy and A Bear In A Boat, he pretty much gave away the whole premise in the title. The book follows the adventures of a boy and a bear in a (you guessed it) boat as they take a journey of indeterminate origin and purpose. As the boy and bear venture to who-knows-where [...]
Twin Forks
A friend of mine once suggested that all music has its proper season and I'm inclined to believe him. Case in point: the folksy vibe of Twin Forks makes their music very appealing to me this time of year when everything is pumpkin-flavored and harvest-themed. There's something warm and comforting in the band's use of male-female harmony, group claps, [...]
Vindicated
Halloween is a strange time when people wear crazy outfits, drink like the key to life is hidden at the bottom of a bottle of cheap vodka, and desperately try to seem attractive. So it's college, basically. Fitting, then, that ten years ago I got to enjoy my first college Halloween. For the record, I failed [...]
Powers
Let's get this out of the way upfront: Ursula Le Guin is a master of the bildungsroman. A Wizard of Earthea, The Farthest Shore, Malafrena, and several of her other books are among the finest coming of age novels in American literature. There are few authors capable of elucidating the challenges of personal discovery the [...]
Material Me
Even though I enjoy a few albums that rely pretty heavily on programming, and despite the fact that I actually own a drum machine, I don't know much about electronic music. I'm just not all that familiar with the style. So now that I've spent a good deal of time enjoying Tilian's decidely electronica Material Me (as predicted here), [...]
NaNoWriMo 2014
Last year was the first year that I participated in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to pound out a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November, forgoing all editing and simply striving to create. It's an admirable goal, writing a novel in [...]
Songs & Stories 