The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Author: jkonrath

  • Sanjay Gupta and Jack Kevorkian went to the same medical school

    I hate end-of-year lists. I didn’t even know it was 2014 for half of the year, and I can’t remember what I wrote, read, bought, or otherwise did. I published two books, and worked on two others, but you probably already know that. I fell down a brief Jack Kevorkian k-hole the other day, probably…

  • I stared at the Jackson Pollock painting for hours, thinking it was a Magic Eye image and I wasn’t getting it

    I like writing in numbered lists. But when my blog posts get sent to Goodreads, they strip off the HTML numbering, and that makes it look like a jumble of loose paragraphs. I take albuterol for allergies, and the smell of it is a very direct reminder of my childhood when I took it. They…

  • This week in data hoarding

    I’ve been busy scraping stuff from open directories and dumping them onto this RAID array. Some of this week’s finds: The complete run of Omni magazine, in CBR format. I wasn’t familiar with CBR files, because I don’t read comics, but they are essentially a collection of lossless images in a compressed container, along with…

  • Interactive fiction versus games

    I’ve been thinking a lot about interactive fiction, trying to find good examples online and learn how to turn existing books into games, or write new hybrid game/books, and it’s made me consider the definition of the two. First, I’ve been playing with this tool called Twine. It reminds me a lot of the old…

  • Unreliable narrators and autobiographical fiction

    This Lena Dunham book has been huge in the memetic ten-second news cycle lately.  I haven’t read it, but the gist of the argument is that her autobiographical(-ish) book has some stuff in it about how she used to share a bed with her sister and various things may have happened (or not, whatever.) There’s…

  • More on this “return to blogging” thing

    Okay, so Marco Arment says this: http://www.marco.org/2014/11/01/short-form-blogging And I agree, on a few things.  First, I never understood twitter. It’s a good format for telling a fast dick joke, or dumping a link to a news article with no comment. But it’s not a good way for me to communicate. I can’t even start to think…

  • Falling down the data hoarding k-hole

    I am becoming a data hoarder. I think I’m genetically predisposed to hoarding, or maybe it was just where I grew up, but every time I saw the show Hoarders on TV, I always thought that like every other person I knew in Indiana had a house that looked like that.  I’m not saying that…

  • The new camera and the march of progress

    I could not sleep a week ago, and woke up in the middle of the night, nauseous from the heat. I went downstairs to sit on the couch with the iPad, and pulled the trigger on an Amazon points subsidized purchase of a new camera, something I’ve been eyeing for a bit. This was the…

  • more return to blogging garbage

    I saw a bunch of articles recently about “the return of the blog” and suddenly remembered I have a blog and I never update it, and maybe while I’m circling rudderless on this next book, I should maybe think about that. I have all of these various “content boxes” to fill, and never know how…

  • Great Review of The Memory Hunter over at Self Publishing Review

    Here’s another great review of The Memory Hunter over at Self Publishing Review: http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/2014/09/review-the-memory-hunter-by-jon-konrath/ In the far-flung future of 2007, in a world that never quite recovered from a Cold War which didn’t stay cold, where Japan seized the global economy and the world went in the direction that novelists predicted decades ago, society now…