I haven’t been writing much on my blog for a few weeks. I think it is from the feeling of being snowed in and so cold. But! I just found an article on how scientists have extracted some Neanderthal DNA and have grown a Neanderthal “mini brain” in a petri… Continue reading
So Svengoolie last weekend showed Creature from the Black Lagoon (not The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is how it always fools me, with that initial definite article, like Carpenters, the sister-and-brother act, not The Carpenters), and I watched it for the umpteenth time and enjoyed it just as… Continue reading
Sometimes I wonder, if were on a desert island, alone in some ocean, would I continue to write, find some way to write? There would be no one to read what I wrote, no one to listen to me read aloud what I had put down, for me to ask… Continue reading
So the other night I was up late and I watched The Twilight Zone on Me-TV, the Chicago channel that boasts Svengoolie and SciFi Saturday Night and otherwise broadcasts nationwide television shows from the Fifties through the Eighties. The episode was “The Masks,” and those of us well-read and of… Continue reading
Word day, I guess. Sometimes I latch onto a word and roll it around in my brain, I don’t know, just to do it because it is a word. In the current issue of Vanity Fair (yes, I subscribe, both to mock the rich and famous in the photographs of… Continue reading
Yeah, it was the worst year in memory, and it hit most of us very hard. However, at the end of each year and the beginning of the next, I try to remind myself that the world didn’t end (although we came close this time) and that there always seem… Continue reading
New day, new year, new— Not exactly a new website, but a revised and revived one. I have Pete Pollack to thank for this. I stopped blogging a long time ago, but now I am retired from my fulltime job as a medical editor, and I guess I am ready… Continue reading
NOTE: Spoilers follow. Where to start with Birdman? It is brilliant to have Michael Keaton, who has always been first rate, carry as extraordinary a picture as this one. All those years since the Batman movies doing smaller, sincere pictures, cable work, and voiceovers, and now here he is in this exceptional, dark,… Continue reading
Oron, originally written in 1973-1974 and published by Zebra Books in 1978, is going to be reissued by Wildside Press/Borgo Press—next year, I hope, but relatively soon, in any event. I’ve scanned in the text—all 93,000 words of it—and am now revising the novel. I have several reasons for doing… Continue reading
If I were ever to teach a class in basic storytelling, especially one in which the class and I discussed popular imaginative fiction, I might very well start off with this book as a perfect example of how to structure a story. The edition of the Walt Disney Cinderella story I mean… Continue reading
