FABULATIONS
"Year after year staring into the blank blue ocean bouncing back all that sunlight’s been flying through space since before you were born, that ocean’s just a big blue mirror and it’ll cook the color right out of your eyes after long."
"He slowed down for his third and by the fourth he stopped staring at her. Somewhere between drinks a weight snapped loose within him and fell away."
DOCUMENTATIONS & CONFESSIONS
Spontaneous Incorporeal Sentience
"In short, SIS proponents are suggesting the random and spontaneous generation of artificially-intelligent code from the noise of deep space."
"Much of film and literature would concur that when it comes to being afraid, nothing always trumps pain. Pain is the devil you know, and its depictions are typically as the after-effects of some cause; the toughest cause to accept is none at all (or, the devil you don’t)... So we absolutely must hang a face on villainy, even if that face is just a hockey mask."
Thirteen Hours at the Oakland Strike
"The last thing I read before I crashed Wednesday night were reports of vandalism in downtown Oakland, and of police once more clamping down on protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets."
The High Priest of the Godless
"But one man’s trash is another man’s dark worldview, as evinced by the French embrace of these tales from the godless gutter of the New World."
Neglected Authors: Seth Morgan
"And it never lets up, this barely stable compound of conversational prose and criminal street slang adulterated with Morgan’s own riotous wordplay…"
NOTES ON THE CRAFT
"The purest way to convey emotion in a story is to elicit that emotion from your reader."
"Even if your protagonist is a perennial couch potato, that character’s desire to do nothing is an act of will."
Talking Heads, Hearing Voices and the Disappearing Narrator
"Good dialogue is all about the author being invisible and letting the characters take center stage."
The Safety of Transgression versus the Risk of Honesty
"A writer cannot push, break or transgress a boundary without first conceding to the definition of that boundary, a definition which by nature is not their own. Thus, an artist who intends foremost to shock, to transgress, willingly trades his own rules for someone else’s. He surrenders his art instead of surrendering to it. And no artist creates anything worthwhile from their comfort zone."