The Stacks

Decorative image: A lizard scrambling up a pile of books. Rays radiate from the lizard's head.

I’m not particularly good at keeping up a regular journal practice, but as long as I have a writing website, I might as well use it to write less formally about things that catch my interest, too. Newest posts are on the bottom of my homepage, but from here you can browse older material….

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  • Book cover for Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman, featuring an ornate gilt picture frame over a deep blue background with glitch effects obscuring a classical portrait of three figures.
    Review: Notes From A Regicide
    As I read Isaac Fellman’s Notes From A Regicide, I kept recalling how I felt when I read M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels. I haven’t read those novels in … oh, I don’t know. Thirty years? Forty? I don’t even really remember the plots. But there is something about Notes…
  • Night scene showing a woman whose figure is outlined by the light of a street lamp as she browses through jumbled books in a display box, under the gaze of a Pierrot-like shopkeeper standing in the doorway, who stares at her over the brim of his glasses.
    Read a Book!
    Copious amounts of research indicate that cognitively active leisure-time activities, even if they’re sedentary, can help defend us from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A 14-year study of almost 2,000 people indicated that reading, especially, can prevent cognitive decline. In fact, reading is among the activities that can actually improve cognitive…
  • A man in a vault has removed the slab covering an embalmed body and is reading from a large book, a triumphant look on his face.
    Writing Update: Rewriting Catch
    I’ve been re-reading and polishing each of the Across the Line novels I’ve posted here for public reading — Hopscotch, Red Rover, Twenty Questions, and Catch. But Catch is notably late to be put online, and that’s because as I re-read it, I realized why I’d stalled out on the…
  • On Bibliotherapy
    This morning I ran across a BBC article about bibliotherapy that raised my eyebrow because the idea of learning things like social behaviors, coping mechanisms, etc. from books was something I’d just … always taken for granted. So I was a little taken aback to learn that not everybody assumes…
  • "We'll All Be Happy Then". Cartoon depicting technological luxuries of the future, by Harry Grant Dart, 1911.
    About Artificial Intelligence
    As a university professor, I’ve had quite a few generative AI-related assignment headaches in the classroom, so I feel for the publishers who are trying to navigate submission piles filled with LLM-generated or significantly -assisted stories and novels right now. And as a writer, I found most of my fiction…
  • Detail from Durer's St. John Devouring the Book
    Welcome to my Worlds-in-Progress
    Writing is messy and a lot less linear than you might think … at least for me. I write things, then they go nowhere and sit in a drawer for a long time, and then I retrieve them and think, “well, some of this is good,” and go back and…