Sci-fi’s best ideas are in the past. Wait! Before you barrage me with indignant objections, I’m going to claim this idea is way less impertinent—or defeatist—than it sounds. Where do sci-fi plot concepts come from? From everywhere, you say, my sources of inspiration are varied and without bound! Okay, sure, the kernels have many sources,…
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The Summer of Jack
For most Americans of a certain age, the summer of 1968 is viewed as a kind of dark chasm that yawned between the Summer of Love and the Summer of Woodstock. It was, after all, the summer of Martin, the summer of Bobby. Of My Lai and Biafra. It marked the rise of Nixon and…
Writing Naked
I am critical of badly written sex scenes. I want, therefore, to be able to write an emotionally singular scenario that scorches as it burns through the heat of unfolding events; a scene that twins joyous abandon with losing one’s self in a blazing physical coupling of passion and sweat. I read various authors with…
Q: Fiction or Nonfiction? A: Both.
I spoke to a writers’ group in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after the publication at age twenty-six of my first book, a nonfiction guide to backpacking and camping in developing countries. I described the vagaries of finding an agent and publisher, and revealed to the audience my real dream as a writer. I told the group…
I could hardly breathe, listening to Yunike’s story.
Our kids were playing marbles in the dirt road outside of her Borneo home. The electricity had been off in my friend’s neighborhood for hours. The stifling air added to her story, the heaviness of the moment turning into sweat running down my face. Yunike Hermanus, my Indonesian friend, was telling a part in her…