Quality time at the Point Defiance Zoo
This beluga whale will sing to you his songs of love. They will sound like opera being sung through a funnel, at the bottom of a bucket. You will fall head over heels. Your parents will disapprove.
So I took a whole bunch of pictures, and if you [...]
Bullet Points to Close Your Week
* Every Friday at 12 noon UK time the wonderful webcomic FREAKANGELS is updated, courtesy of Warren Ellis (author) and Paul Duffield (artist). Go check it out. Because this is the way the world ends: strangely, and with beauty.
* I’m hunting for suggestions re: Twitter; which is to say, I want [...]
Finding Draft One
Lately I’ve gotten some email asking about how a novel’s Draft Zero becomes a Draft One, and what the difference is between them. I can only speak for myself, of course; your processes may vary; offer void where prohibited, commentary sold by weight and not volume, etcetera.
Draft Zero: When the final period is [...]
Of Gods and Women
In 1993 I was living in the girls’ dormitory at a Seventh Day Adventist high school in Florida. Inside “Little Alcatraz,” I was one of about a hundred teenagers deprived of television and radio (among other things); so I think we could be forgiven for being very confused when, at the end of February [...]
I’ll take “Stranger than Fiction” for a thousand, Alex
‘Wolverine’ frogs pop retractable claws from their toes.
In the X-Men comics, the superhero Wolverine is armed with three sharp claws on each arm. They extend through the skin of his hand, and the resulting wounds are closed by up his superhuman ability to heal. Now, in a bizarre case of life [...]