Review of Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life, by Nick Mamatas
Starve Better by Nick Mamatas is an entertaining, engaging, occasionally caustic introduction to the writing life. If you’re a writer looking for some sage advice, …
Lone Survivor
This was way better than expected. Admittedly, I didn’t expect much. Action movies these days have become a wasteland of reboots, sequels, and old, old men with puffy faces echoing catch phrases that lost their freshness three decades …
Paul Verhoeven is one of the great misunderstood satirists of modern cinema.
His work is often dismissed as mindless ultra-violence. Though most critics understand that Robocop and Total Recall were, at their core, satires of corporate culture and greed, he’s …
It’s not true, of course. Authors such as Orwell, Ishiguro, and Camus were formative influences on me, as were many others.
However – and as you can probably tell from this website – if I were allowed to choose only …
The first short story I ever wrote, The Volunteer, managed to earn a spot in an Asia-Pacific speculative fiction anthology. I’m told it’s uncommon to sell your first short story, and was very pleased to find a home for …
There must be something in the water down in Australia. The two high roller events for the Aussie Millions – the 100,000k challenge (with re-buys) and the 250,000k (with re-buys) broke all previous field sizes this year, and by a …
Alligator Blood, the true story of Australian entrepreneur, Daniel Tzvetkoff, should have been a compelling read. It has all the ingredients: greed, hubris, extravagant wealth, a dizzying rise followed by a precipitous fall; the noir underbelly of the online porn …
Writing fiction is tough. I’ll tell you that for free.
It has a degree of difficulty far above that of non-fiction. Aside from the fact that bringing distinct characters to life, painting vivid scenes, churning out snappy dialogue and finding …
“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”
The obituaries for …
I wrote ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ in 2012 in response to the comments of some moron of the day. There are so many on the issue of homosexuality it’s hard to keep up sometimes. This past week has seen a …
