The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I [...]

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For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — – –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).
The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” [...]

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Today marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Lester Dent, a/k/a Kenneth Robeson.
Not exactly a household name these days, eh? But in his time, which occupied a substantial chunk of the first half of the last century (he died young, in 1959), Dent was one of the most prolific and most successful writers on [...]

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Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown says something about writing a story from the point of view of a character other than the author’s own sex. I don’t remember the exact words, don’t have my copy with me, and can’t find the quote online. But she says [...]

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You may remember my 10(ish)-year-old story “The Bug,” which I posted here a few weeks ago. In it, the protagonist — home at work with a fever, some kind of bug anyhow — stumbles upon a very strange cable-TV channel. Its name is The Dead Channel; all its programming has to do, somehow, with death. [...]

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and…
…no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should.
What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my mouth shut [...]

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One thing The Missus has always said about my writing: if it amuses no one else, it amuses me. Personally, I think she exaggerates. It doesn’t all “amuse” me. [wounded sniff] But one story, well, I really enjoyed writing it. And it still makes me grin to re-read.
Like many stories I wrote in the ’90s, [...]

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Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.
(If you’ve no other [...]

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A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I [...]

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After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.
A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a [...]

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