Despite issues with logging in to the comments, last week’s drabble lab was great. Hopefully, sign-in issues will be resolved this time around; if you couldn’t get your drabble in for last time I’m sorry! I was really impressed this week with the breadth of interpretations of the theme. There were a lot of different interpretations, and they were all quite interesting! Read on fo... »
This round of Drabble Lab made me grin, because there were so many repeating themes. You know you write for a wonderfully skeptical audience when the prompt of ‘truth’ yields stories mostly about the fallibility of human reason and the possible reality of totally implausible situations. In short, in most of these stories, there was no truth. And that was awesome. Once again, I recommend everyone c... »
Recently, Douglass Rushkoff talked about something called “Present Shock” in Wired. In particular one quote stood out for me, about how storytelling is changing: “Think Game of Thrones. In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn’t really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it’s structured less like a TV sh... »
Drabble lab last week went phenomenally! There were so many great entries that I had a desperately hard time choosing a winner. You should definitely check out the whole thread, with all 14 drabbles (that’s only 1400 words; it won’t take you too long!). But in the meantime, here are runners up, a winner, and a new theme! For those of you who don’t know what is going on: Drabble l... »
Maybe you’ve been watching the photo lab with a certain amount of envy, because your camera is covered with a thick layer of dust that inspires nothing short of shame and dread when you think about picking it up. Maybe you’re like me, and write with a certain compulsiveness that is just short of unhealthy. Maybe you want another opportunity to participate, or want to give writing a try... »
So I made an off-handed remark about the biological plausibility of dragons in one of my Game of Thrones posts, and got several comments, posted and via e-mail, essentially amounting to “Wait! I want to read that post!”. Ask and you shall receive: I called in some help from my friendly neighborhood developmental biologist blogger, and she gave me some background information to run with. I’m going ... »
I hope you had as much fun reading these as I did writing them. This will be the last one, unless the new book reveals some totally wacky inheritance or the new season seriously deviates from the books. And I’d like to talk about something that Daenerys Targaryen waxes poetic about for ages and ages: dragons. »
I wanted to shift gears a little bit and finally stop talking so much about Robert Baratheon. And a lot of the most interesting genetic wackiness in Game of Thrones surrounds an entirely different family: the Targaryens. The Targaryen words are “fire and blood”, which to me means their two most important traits are (1) dragons and (2) inbreeding, although not necessarily in that order. The Targary... »
