The door of the plane opens and the first hint of the tropical night wafts inside. In spite of nearly twenty-four hours of traveling, the fresh air and perfumed humidity wake me up. That, and the knowledge that I’ve arrived.
I’ve flown from London to Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii [...]

Peruse the genre section of any bookstore and you will see a large chunk of shelf-space bending under the weight of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Lucrative and popular, media tie-in fiction is a sub-genre all to itself. It even has its own professional organization, the [...]

In the antiseptic, sour-smelling halls of psychology, there is an entire wing devoted to Anxiety. Within that wing is a dingy corner containing a dry mop and a broken drinking fountain bearing a sign that reads "Please Love Me." This section is wholly devoted to Writer’s Anxiety.
There is a hierarchy [...]

It was two long months of candlelight demonstrations in Seoul.
They began on May 2nd. The only blockage the police erected then was a flimsy perimeter round the protest area. But soon, downtown Seoul would fall into a nightly ritual of lockdown at sunset: the adjacent road leading to the Presidential [...]

Back in the heyday of the science classes I adored, I learned something very important about the color white: it isn’t actually a color. It’s the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum.  Now I’m talking light here, not pigment. Mix all your paints together and you get [...]

This essay was presented as part of a panel called “Reeling Beyond Realism: But to Reel in What?” proposed by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn Publishing for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in New York City.  I’m grateful to Rusty and Ken for proposing such a fantastic panel, and [...]

It all started with Lance Casebeer.
In the late 60s, a man with a name that sounded as if it’d come straight from a cheap crime novel started collecting old paperbacks. Casebeer, who’d once been a comic book dealer, traded one expendable pop culture item for another, and in 1976 he [...]

In recent years, popular science journals have been full of articles excitedly reporting "genetic markers" for depression, sexual orientation, alcoholism, IQ, and any number of other behavioral traits. The scientific journals cheerfully publish heritability statistics, which are often mistaken for estimates of genetic contributions to behavior, and used as justification [...]

"I’d like to throttle Frodo." Gary Gygax (1938-2008)
Take a group of socially awkward souls, a few gallons of Mountain Dew, a bag full of funny-looking dice, some sheets of paper, a rulebook or ten, add an argument about vorpal blades and Umber Hulks, and you have a scene that likely strikes [...]

I’m not a full-time writer. It’s much worse than that: I’m a guy with a day job who also has enough freelance work to keep a full-time writer busy. In the past couple of years I’ve made more money from writing than I have in my job as an editor at [...]