If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta [...]

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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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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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[Image at right: artist's rendering of a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract]
Walter Tevis, who died in 1984, was the author of several popular novels made into very successful movies: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But he began his career writing straight-up science fiction. Among his earliest stories was [...]

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As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before, The Missus and I have a recent addition to our household population: a Yorkshire terrier named Sophie. That is not Sophie over at the right — it’s one “Lexi Ann,” from the dogsinduds.com site. But it’s a good place to start this post.
We got Sophie as a “rescue dog,” which [...]

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A few weeks ago, I read a blog entry somewhere about the claim (phrased variously) that the setting in a given work “becomes like [or even is] a character itself.” It drove the blogger crazy, because setting and character (in his/her opinion) have so little in common. Whatever my other reactions to the rant, it got [...]

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(Part 1 of this N-part series was here.)
Let’s see, where were we… Oh. Right. I’d just posted excerpts from the Prologue to Crossed Wires, my 1992 mystery, and Chapter 1 from its never-published sequel, Trapdoor. And I said that the differences between those two excerpts sprang from “something” that happened in the roughly one year [...]

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[In a post a few days ago, I started to nose around my "issues" with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don't like to do, much -- to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of [...]

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When I first moved down here in 1993 to be with the woman who would eventually become The Missus, among the things that excited me (as opposed to the things I dreaded) was her writing circle.
At the time, she was enrolled in a graduate creative-writing program. She had met numerous other writers through that program, [...]

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I have always had a weird affinity for the cartoonist Jack Ziegler, whom I first encountered in The New Yorker. He’s not their most prolific contributor — these days, you might find his work once in every three or four issues. Time was, though, when he put in an appearance weekly. And for whatever reason, [...]

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