Author: Anthony Dobranski
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Russia, a cautionary tale
A short note, for those who read my last post: I made my goal, reducing my novel 10.2% down to 124,400 words. Not merely a slimming — at least ten passages, or one every 15,000 words, needed a complete rewrite just to make sense, and in some cases had to grow. It was a grueling…
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More Edits
The heck with this, I know — but I am editing the book again. I thought I was done, or done for now. At 138K a little big but, you know, big-boned. It was fine. I could write new stories now, send out queries, sure that some kind agent would understand me. A major contest…
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Two Riffs on Edward Snowden
1) The Great Success of “Operation Snowden” Three months ago, the Washington Post’s alpha-wonk Ezra Klein noted the double-think in Washington, that we could obviously create a vast enterprise to monitor all human information (using closed-source tools), but obviously the effort to provide healthcare to all was inevitably doomed by the same contracting procedures. Of…
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Amish barn poo and the undoing of damage
I am loath to question scientists, who are vastly more informed than I am about their field of study. But even the smart can be unwise. A recent New York Times opinion essay, breathlessly titled “A Cure for the Allergy Epidemic,” described a search for allergy cures in the dust and offal in Amish farms.…
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The Autumn 2013 Plan
Speaking strictly commercially, I did everything wrong with my writing. I don’t have an identifiable genre or sub-genre. It’s a literary noir-styled fantasy thriller romance and an allegory about globalization and growing up. There’s no shelf for that. Crossing genres and styles is gaining popularity, but it’s still a hard sell to make cold. Perhaps…
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Science fiction as time travel
I grew up on a solid diet of science fiction, and as a young man in the 1970s and 1980s I had a wide range of style to choose from — New Wave, Old Guard, the Cyberpunks. To read them all at once was like the old Evolution of Man posters, the history of the…
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Shutdown blues 2013 in the fissiparous USA
Two years ago I was in a tizzy about the political battles that risked our financial system. Now I am blasé. The government shutdown is a great mistake, an injustice to the needy and a body-blow to our feeble economy. It was alas inevitable. One group is intent on demonstrating its faith in a strong…
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Deep breath
I think my creative retreat is deeper than I first acknowledged. For professional reasons I want to leap into writing short pieces but I am far from leaping. A novel is a great mecha suit, immense powers but within strict rules. Wearing it so long has left a host of implants and fixators that need…
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Meandering Progress Report Sep 2013
As I wrote a novel with a corporate setting, florid language became dead weight. I needed to make a corporate motif, a slickness half jet-age half cyberpunk. It took many drafts to make that happen since it was a big story. I resolved not to write like film or for film, but to edit my…
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Better writing through selfishness
Some years ago I attended a conference at Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington DC on art and democracy. Along with the artists and patrons and at least one historian, many who came were national and local activists for marginalized communities invisible to national culture. They made impassioned pleas for the assembled artists to take the…