Author: jkonrath
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Review: Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles
It feels like I’ve read too many Burroughs bios lately. I just checked the shelf, and there are a dozen and a half of them, and that wasn’t something I planned. I’m not writing a dissertation or making this my life’s work. I think it was because Road to Interzone came out and then went out…
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The long walk to W384 Intensive Writing
I love it when it’s cool in the early morning after a hot day. There’s a certain charge in the air that’s unexplainable, not just the relief from the heat, but a somnolent, undisturbed feeling. It was 83 yesterday, and I woke up to 55, and it was wonderful, even if it will be back…
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I don’t know that people take walks of any length on piers these days, short or long
I walked four miles yesterday, in a sudden fit of “I am going to be fucked when I go on vacation and have to walk all day.” I brought my old iPod and left my phone and wallet at home, so I would not lose them in a mugging (I’d just lose my own life…
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My Writing Process, 2014 Edition
Okay, so there’s this thing going around, a #MyWritingProcessTour thing, and you know how these memes work – someone nominates you to answer a bunch of questions, you nominate a few other people to do the same, and so on. I’ve written a lot about process here, and I talked about it in an interview…
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The market for YA books about euthanasia is going to be huge someday, so get on that now
So I booked my trip to Germany this week, which was a huge hit on the credit card, but at least I figured out the dates and times. I’m going to be in Nuremberg for basically a weekend, and then Frankfurt for a week. Travel times screw with that a bit, though. I couldn’t figure…
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Happy birthday, Wrath of Kon
This site has been here, in one form another, for 17 years now. In 1997, I got together a couple of half-baked elisp scripts and installed them on my shell account over at Speakeasy. This was before the word ‘blog’ was invented. Mark Zuckerberg was 13 and Facebook was nowhere near an idea yet. Social…
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AlphaSmart and distraction-free writing
It has been impossible for me to write lately without spending time fucking around, checking the web, reading through old email, whatever. So I am trying something new: writing on an AlphaSmart Dana word processor. The Dana is essentially an overgrown Palm Pilot, glued to a full-sized keyboard. It has a monochrome touch screen that’s…
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A Stupid Nostalgia Listicle (Or, You Won’t Believe these 15 Things From The Nineties That Will Help You Lose Weight That The IRS Doesn’t Want You To Find Out About!)
I have been binge-watching the show West Wing lately, because S has never seen it, and I watched a lot of the first few seasons until it got stupid, back when I was supposed to be writing the follow-up for Rumored to Exist, which never happened. So I remember bits and pieces of the show, and…
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RIP, Oderus
I woke up this morning and found the start of a flood of Facebook posts that I thought had to be a hoax, but they were true: Dave Brockie, also known to many as Oderus Urungus of Gwar, had been found dead last night. He was only 50. I must have first heard about Gwar…
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Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel
I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel, the latest Wes Andserson flick, last night. I don’t like watching movies like that on opening weekend, because they draw the baby boomer intelligentsia Berkeley crowd, the ones that never see movies and then laugh at the wrong places at the stupid pre-trailer ads that I’ve seen a thousand…