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Robopocalypse Not

Daniel H. Wilson has a PhD in robotics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—which has one heck of a good robotics program, by the way. He knows way more than I ever will about...

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Genius

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830. In honor of her birthday, here is a post from 2009. “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Emily Dickinson wrote that line, but she didn’t mean it. She knew she was...

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Little, Big

I know people who get tens of thousands of  hits a month on their blogs, but I am not one of them. Barring some freakish celebrity, this will not happen. Should I stop blogging, knowing this? Sometimes...

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The power of story

Last week  I found an old college notebook and on one of the pages was this quotation from Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea: A man is always a teller of tales. He lives surrounded by his stories and the...

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The Artist’s Way Week 4: Reading deprivation

For Christmas a friend gave me a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.  In a vague intuitive way,  I thought  “something good is about to come from this.” It has. It will. I had the mistaken...

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The Artist’s Way week 5: fasten your seat belts

Last week I blogged about doing the twelve-week course in  Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.  That was week 4: reading deprivation. This is week 5. The topic This week’s overall topic is barriers:...

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We are all typists

The only useful thing I learned in high school was how to touch-type. It a good thing to know, even with the awkwardness of the QWERTY keyboard. (Its purpose was not to slow typists down, by the way....

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The Next Big Thing

Another indie author, Christa Polkinhorn, invited me to participate in a round-robin blog tour in which authors of various stripes would describe their next project. (See links for Susan Eisenberg and...

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“We want a beautiful solution”

The 18th century automaton called The Turk could play chess with humans and win. It once played Benjamin Franklin and presumably beat him. It attracted acclaim for this chess-playing ability. Except...

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Christa Polkinhorn on families, relationships, and her new novel EMILIA

Christa Polkinhorn has just published the third book in her Family Portrait series: EMILIA. The other two are LOVE OF A STONEMASON and AN UNCOMMON FAMILY. These novels—set in Switzerland, Italy, Peru,...

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How to be productive

As every writer knows, there is a ton of bad writing advice out there. Ten things you should NEVER do. Ten things you should ALWAYS do. Writers, particularly unpublished ones, are susceptible to...

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Popular?

I was thinking about popularity—what it is and what it means—in the context of NBC’s fine series SMASH being cancelled because not enough people watched it (apparently). That means it had only a few...

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Critics

Last Sunday after the TV series SMASH ended its run in a blaze, some cast members were tweeting their thanks to people who like the show. In the midst of thanking fans for their love, enthusiasm,...

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The limits of artifical intelligence

Neuroscientist Gary Marcus wrote a good (and for the New Yorker, fairly short) piece called “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The problem: your computer doesn’t think like a person. Its logic has...

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The e-beasts are coming

My forthcoming novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is replete with e-beasts of all sizes, descriptions, and attitudes toward the human race. Some like people. Others do not. Where do the...

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An e-Bestiary, part 1

My forthcoming novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is replete withe-beasts of all sizes, descriptions, and attitudes toward the human race. Where do the e-beasts live? In the Internet, of...

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An e-Bestiary, part 2

My forthcoming novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is replete with e-beasts of all sizes, descriptions, and attitudes toward the human race. Where do the e-beasts live? In the Internet, of...

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An e-Bestiary, part 3

My forthcoming novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is replete with e-beasts of all sizes, descriptions, and attitudes toward the human race. Where do the e-beasts live? In the Internet, of...

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Where do the stories come from?

I am unqualified to deliver pronouncements about the future as it applies to machine technology, though I did it once with a novel about life in a future machine age, CEL & ANNA. I am about to do...

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An e-Bestiary, part 4

My forthcoming novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is replete with e-beasts of all sizes, descriptions, and attitudes toward the human race. The e-beasts live In Networld. In parts 1, 2,  and 3...

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