You Can be a Blogger Too!

I think it is a fallacy that to be a writer, you have to be an interesting person. After all, they always tell you: ‘write what you know.’ If all you have known is a boring life, how can you write about that? Who would want to read it? I have been doing this blog for six years now. While I do not fool myself that this is the New Yorker, I am reasonably pleased with the work I have done. Though I write it mainly for me, it has gotten some notice. This blog seems to be particularly popular in Hong Kong for some reason.

I say all this because I am not an interesting person. Well, I am as interesting as the next guy, but I mean I am not especially interesting. I have not discovered any scientific breakthroughs, ridden a rocket to space, joined the Peace Corps to help people in some dark corner of the world. I have never been in the military, not a doctor, nor ridden the Deadliest Catch ice waves of Alaska. On the other hand, I have not had my city bombed or suffered unspeakable tragedy (knock wood). I have never been oppressed and fought against my oppressors. I have had the minor victories, minor adventures, and minor tragedies that befall most people.

It does not matter if you are average, if you haven’t set the world on fire. You still have stories to tell. Everyone does. You don’t have to have sailed the seven seas to find interesting things. A story about being a bus boy at a restaurant can be interesting if it is well written. And that is just if you “write what you know.” There is no law that says you have to write what you know. That is what imagination is for. That is kind of the whole point of art.

If you don’t think you have stories to tell, you are probably wrong. Getting those stories out in a form that anyone would want to read . . . that is the hard part. But it is attainable with practice. You do get better at writing the more you do it. My first stories were pretty bad if I am honest, but the stories got better as I went along. Excuse me, the stories didn’t get better; the writing got better. So if you have ever had a desire to express yourself, just do it.

Star Liner

Comments

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...

The Linear Nature of Time

Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back No you cannot Go back Star Liner

The Screaming Silence

As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog