What I Wrote on September 11, 2001
On the evening of 11 September 2001 I wrote about what I had watched that day, and never revised it. Twenty-five years later, some of it holds up and some of it is wrong in ways that took years to…
Tag: Writing Craft (Page 16)
AI WritingAI Detection Cannot Be Evidence, and Publishing Is Using It That Way
An author can now lose a publishing contract because a stranger uploaded their manuscript to a website and got a number back. Here is why those numbers cannot bear the weight being put on them, and what a writer should…
FictionThe Office Block Where the Bedrooms Are
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
Critical ThinkingBlack Tuesday: The Web Ring War Nobody Outside It Noticed
Web rings were how you found things before search worked. I belonged to more than two hundred of them and ran a dozen, and when I finally closed my account it held 2,900 memberships. On 5 September 2000 Yahoo replaced…
Character DevelopmentBlack Tuesday: The Original ring-master.net Page, 2000
The page I published at ring-master.net in 2000 and 2001 after Yahoo replaced the WebRing system: what changed, what ringmasters said about it on the message boards, and the American Pie parody somebody wrote for the occasion.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Dissolution Wars
Burn schedules approved, nine worlds. Seven seconds later, archive their naming-day customs before they are lost. She wrote both, and at the time neither entry knew about the other.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: Real World Survival
I asked a member of my own team what he would do in an earthquake. He said he would get under the window, without hesitating. He was not stupid. Nobody had ever told him.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Reincarnation
I have landed on Iwo Jima. I have died in the mud of the Western Front. Not as belief exactly, but as memory that does not belong to this life and will not leave. This novel began there.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Show Don’t Tell
Show, don’t tell was the advice I disliked most, because nobody ever explained it. Critique groups told me I was telling too much without once saying what that meant.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: Stuck in the Middle
Four books ago I sat down to write about why Americans had stopped thinking. Each one dragged me somewhere I did not expect, and this is the book where all four of them meet.
FictionBehind the Book: The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo
A friend has a violin tattooed across her back. That is the entire origin, and the story has nothing to do with her. I wanted to know who would choose that image.
AmericaBehind the Book: The Emasculation of America
I did not set out to write this book. I set out to understand what I was watching on YouTube, and the view counts were too high for it to be fringe.