I’m running a few series on my blog. This page acts as a table of contents for those series. I’ll update this page as new posts are published.
Twenty Writers, Twenty Books
My introduction to Twenty Writers, Twenty Books explains the questionable sanity of starting this project. In a nutshell: I’m writing about twenty writers whose work has deeply influenced me—my reading, my writing, and in life. For each writer I select a representative book to discuss and analyze.
The list so far:
- B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
- Haruki Murakami, Underground
- Studs Terkel, Working
- Dashiell Hammett, “The Flitcraft Parable” (from The Maltese Falcon) (and a second interpretation of the parable)
- Yoshihiro Tatsumi, in retrospect (The Push Man and Other Stories)
- Peter Bagge, HATE
- David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
- B. R. Myers, A Reader’s Manifesto
- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
- William Gibson, Neuromancer
Ten years of blogging
I launched this web site in 2014. In 2024, I began writing brief entries on my favorite blog entry for each year since. The introductory entry summarizes why I started this project, and what I hope to achieve with it.
- The mysterious B. Traven (2014)
- An unusual parable (2015)
- Portable dreamweavers (2016)
- A literary eulogy (2017)
- An all-too-familiar utopia (2018)
- Writer’s block (2019)
- Flaubertian three-dimensionalism (2020)
Writing better fiction with Syd Field’s three-act screenplay structure
Syd Field made a career out of teaching screenwriters (novice and professional) how to write movies using his three-act structure. Although fiction is a separate and unique medium, I’ve learned a lot from Syd Field’s paradigm. This series goes over what I’ve gleaned from Syd Field and how I adapted his three-act structure to writing fiction.
Computer programming & writing fiction
As a software developer and computer enthusiast since the 1970s, I’m often asked what similarities exist between programming and writing fiction. My answer is complicated, and so I’ve broken down my answer into a series of blog posts.