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Speculations 1: Updates
Background It has been some time since I have updated this blog. The last entries I see here are dated 2019, and only I know that they are actually from 2016, the later dates being blogs I resurrected after I botched a redesign of the site and accidentally abandoned my many old blog posts –…
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Setting-Up a Scene with Isabel Allende
With breezy confidence and breathtaking detail, Isabel Allende evokes the forty year history of a slave woman from 18th century Haiti and other people connected to her. Allende’s prose moves with the speed of a jet ski and the grace of a ballerina, and a few chapters of THE ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA cover several…
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Relating Hallucinatory Imagery with Ahmed Bouanani
So, I just started reading Ahmed Bouanani’s THE HOSPITAL, which was recently released in English, translated from a uniquely-Moroccan dialect of French. This novella is wonderful, mesmerizing, strange, and moving–it begins with the words “When I walked into the hospital, I must have still been alive.” And it leaps immediately and confidently into an absurdist…
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Pacing Techniques with Jeff Vandermeer
One thing I noticed (and loved) about BORNE was that, compared to Vandermeer’s previous work, it’s much lighter on its feet. It dances and weaves and generally just progresses at a much more rapid pace than say, FINCH, which was much more grounded and plodding. The scene we’ll look at today, with rapid problem solving…
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Sensory Action with Samuel Delany
Although I have yet to finish it, Dhalgren has already left some kind of mark on me. After reading Delany’s About Writing, I decided to give it a go, to take a look at the experiment he was attempting, quite intentionally, to write a character’s experience of the world on a finite moment-to-moment level. I’ve decided…
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Setting as Obstacle with Brian Evenson
When I’m working on a new novel, I try to turn to old favorites to mine for examples of what I’m trying to do. Brian Evenson’s Immobility is one of those, for me. Today we’ll be examining a scene that’s doing something I’m attempting in the WIP–using a simple setting as an obstacle for a…
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Productive Dialogue with Jeff Vandermeer
Clicking the image to the left will take you to the Amazon page for the edition I own of Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy, which we’ll be talking about today. Obviously, I don’t expect you to read the entire novel just in preparation for this post, but I’ll be providing a few pages below for context…
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Act One with China Mieville
Clicking the picture to the left will take you to the Amazon page for King Rat by China Mieville. Seems obvious to me that you won’t be reading this novel in preparation for reading this blog post, but we’ll be talking about plot so beware of spoilers below. Today I’m going to be talking about plot–the…
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Setting the Scene in Historical Fiction with Marc Laidlaw
Clicking the picture to the left will take you straight to the purchase page for the Mar/Apr 2016 issue of F&SF, where you can find this weeks story “The Ghost Penny Post” by Marc Laidlaw. Unfortunately, the story is not available anywhere online. As far as the issue goes, I enjoyed it–especially the Cat Rambo…
Speculations Blog