Nature Narratives in Fiction & Photography
Tonight the bloodstained curtain falls on Game of Thrones, the epic HBO series based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. In a fittingly meta twist, the final season’s harshest feud unfolded not between Starks and Lannisters, but viewers and writers. Denouncing television adapters David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as “incompetent”,... Continue Reading →
Maybe I entered the world of Barsk with poorly calibrated expectations. Lavish critical praise described a unique, thoughtful science fiction tale. I typically view such panegyric with skepticism, but the book's premise sounded legitimately intriguing: in a galaxy of advanced sapient mammals, a planet inhabited by an ostracized elephantine race produces a unique drug that... Continue Reading →
Spoiler alert: this post contains minor spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6 “Gendry is obviously not Robert Baratheon’s bastard,” I observed to my Laddie during the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. “His father has to be The Flash.” After a few days' hiking with the wight-hunting party, our warrior-blacksmith seems... Continue Reading →
My Laddie and I both adore science fiction, so when the new series Dark Matter appeared in our Netflix queue, it caught our attention. A cursory review of Amazon showed high ratings. While we don't expect anything will ever fill the void Firefly left in our nerdy hearts, we decided to give the pilot episode a... Continue Reading →
Last night I began teaching my first creative writing class at a local college. The course helps participants launch their first novel, from the germ idea through the first chapters. While I don’t claim to be an expert in the discipline—Ernest Hemingway famously said that writing is a craft where no one ever becomes a master—I... Continue Reading →
This post concludes a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel, Blue Karma. Conclusion Over the past week, I've shared the five greatest challenges I encountered writing the cli-fi genre: turning a vision into a narrative, defining the scope and thematic focus of the story, drawing inspiration from current events, and avoiding rhetoric.... Continue Reading →
Wild Type 