I generally enjoy reading Richard Dawkins’s books. I find the man himself to be more or less reasonable in interviews (or, at least, as reasonable as everyone else I’ve seen). I share his skepticism of religious and supernatural phenomena; I share his belief that science really does bring us closer…
I’ve been working on some short stories lately, and I can’t help but notice a pattern in them and some of my novels: many of them are about how the main character comes to be the villain of the narrative.
Happy Chanukah to all you fellow Jews out there! And merry Christmas to those who celebrate! And happy NOT HAVING TO WORK/GETTING OVERTIME PAY DAY (!!!) to everyone else! And also happy first anniversary to Kevin and Davina! Mazal tov, guys! Things are still a bit rough for my family…
This blog entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. (That pretty much means you can copy it, re-post it, link to it, change it, do whatever, as long as you point out that the original came from here/me and you don’t make money off it. Why?…
Whenever I play any game in the Legend of Zelda series, I find myself getting a lot jumpier. Like, I’ll keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corners of my eyes, or, when I go to bed at night, I can’t shake the feeling that something might be right…
We seem to have a strong intuition that part of what makes us human is our ability to die. Witness the countless stories in which the villains’ goal is to live forever, or in which a character demonstrates his or her essential humanity by giving up the opportunity to do…
After last week’s big old long post about criticism, I figured I’d like to get back in the not-tl;dr-post game. But what to write about? Then I remembered: c’est l’Hallowe’en! Everyone knows that Hallowe’en is a time to dress up, get candy, and have fun. There’s no greater moral to…
What is constructive criticism, and where does it overstep the boundary between “criticism” and “attack”? I’m interested because of this. Let me first make clear that I don’t care one way or the other about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. I read the first book, didn’t like it at all, and…
But first – yay for friends visiting and for visiting friends. My friend Christina visited Toronto from Texas this week, and now I’m in Ottawa, able to visit other friends. Thanks, Christina, for making it out to Toronto, and thanks, Ottawa people, for hanging out :) Right. Free speech. I’ve…
I can’t think of anything interesting to write about. So here are some speculative fiction for middle grade and young adult readers that I like. None of them is by any means flawless, but I enjoyed them all. So there. As a bonus, here is one non-speculative fiction middle-grade book…