Veiled Girl With Lute – Last Chance to Read and Listen
My very long short story “Veiled Girl With Lute” has been accepted for publication and so I’ll be taking both the text and podcasted versions down over the weekend. **** This series has now been removed ****
The Privilege of Choice
I received a lot of gratifying comments on my last post on the subject, but it reminded me that I perhaps had an obligation to balance it. The wired world has become a mosaic of communities who share common interests. There are groups for every interest under the sun and it becomes easy, if you […]
Apologies for the Silence – Yangon, Myanmar
I’ve been traveling. After years and years of contemplating whether it was ethical to visit Myanmar (or Burma), and after it became even possible to get a visa arranged to visit the country from Ho Chi Minh City, I decided to go. Like Vietnam, Burma was also a colony. It was colonized by the English, […]
The Ephemeral Quality of Dominance
This post has been coming for a while, and then a twitter conversation with @DarkGracie sort of kicked me into finally writing it. If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you’ll have noticed I seldom use terms like dominant or submissive in my stories. I tend to leave the labeling to my readers. […]
So Close, And Yet So Far: POV and Head Hopping in Erotic Fiction
One of the most common mistakes I see new writers make is something called head hopping: the act of showing what more than a single character is thinking in a scene. Basically, what is happening is the writer is switching from the POV of one character to the other and back again. If knowing what […]
The Duties of an Author and the Responsibilities of a Reader
There are aspects of the rise of online booksellers, e-books, reader-reviews and the general phenomena surrounding reading and the internet that I like very much. But there are also parts of it I abhor. Self-publishing, the rise of small e-book presses and the refusal of publishers to do the marketing they once did has meant […]
To Think or Not to Think… In Which Your Faithful Narrator Rebuts Palahniuk’s Banishing of the Thought Verbs
First, have a read of this very interesting essay by Chuck Palahniuk on ‘thought’ verbs and why you shouldn’t use them. Hopefully, I haven’t lost you. I’m going to attempt to put together some robust arguments for why I think he’s wrong. Not completely wrong. A great deal of what he says is true, makes […]
How to Survive A Death by Drowning
The first breath is the hardest. On waking, it feels impossible to take in any air with my lungs still filled with the sea water of my dream. I’ve been sleeping, dreaming, floating beneath the surface for a long time. I didn’t fly to another country; I traveled into the warm, deep green. At first […]
There is no Freedom without Risk: Suck it Up.
Many Britons I know are in an uproar about Prime Minister David Cameron’s threat to force Google to block certain searches. He’s riding on a massive wave of anti-pedophilia hysteria that has gripped the UK for the past 8 years, fed by an obsessive press that can’t get enough of reporting the titilating details of […]
On Kissing
First, I’d like to acknowledge my blatant thievery. The title is a shameless appropriation from Derrida’s book on Jean Luc Nancy: On Touching. It’s a damn difficult read and I’ve never made it all the way through. It’s one of those texts that, unless you’re doing a dissertation on Nancy or Derrida, probably works best […]