As I hammer away at a keyboard, my youngest brother hammers away at other things. (He’s the one in the middle. Also, his sweatshirt is not on fire, though he said it might as well have been.) I’d be proud to know, and I’d want to know, all my siblings, even if I wasn’t related to them. They’ve made families, careers, and have made my life — and the lives of many others as well — better in too many ways to count.
So many reasons to like this:
but I think I like it most for the closure. Scott McCloud would be proud!
…is more speech, or more money?
Both, apparently.
Sometimes being a member of the ACLU puts me in an uncomfortable position. Its enthusiastic support of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is one of those times.
Ira Glasser, former executive director, offers an explanation of why we should like this. Intellectually, I get it. But I still don’t like it. The Onion does its usual excellent job of highlighting why.
Author Robert B. Parker died suddenly a couple of weeks ago, and it makes me sad. I’ve enjoyed his books for over 20 years, and particularly recommend the first dozen of his novels about Spenser — the private detective, not the poet. His discipline (write 5 pages a day, no more and no less) and his craft (even after multiple readings of, say Valediction, I’m still amazed at how he could move from introspection to violent action and back) and his ability with dialogue are inspiring. Hard to match, though; I know he would have found a better way to write that last sentence, and could have done it without the parentheticals.
I don’t know why I never wrote him a fan letter, but I didn’t. Probably because I still can’t think of anything to say but thank you, and now all I can do is say it in public. So, thank you. And thanks to wanting to learn more about him, I ran across Wired for Books, where I will now spend more time than I ought to spare listening to author interviews. I counted more than 85 that I want to hear right now.
But I’ll try to emulate Parker’s disciplined approach to making books and be sure I get my pages written before I start listening. When I do, I’ll start with him.
Tim O’Shea interviewed me for the swell Robot 6 sector of Comic Book Resources, and you can find it here. I tried not to say the same things about the same things, as a rival philosopher once accused Socrates of doing. But I’m no Socrates, so maybe I did. At the end you’ll find out more about what I should be writing instead of this blog post, though…
That’s the name of the serialized story I’m doing for Tor.com, and I’m taking a break from writing it to note that the sequence that I thought would be impossible in the first act came together in one night* last week, so this next bit, which I think will be easy, will probably be difficult. I’ve come to expect that I’m wrong about stories I’m writing a lot more often than I’m right.
But in tonight’s batch of pages Turing enters Bletchley Park, and everybody is glad to see him there, myself included.
[*a night that ended late, and with a smile, and with a splitting headache]
