I recently came across a track on an old cassette which is the first song I wrote that was actually played by a band. The band was called Eklektix, and it existed for a brief period in 1981, maybe into 1982. My memory of the time is kind of hazy, so some of this may…
As one of the founding members of the Seaprog Festival in Seattle, I’ve had a part in organizing every one of the seven festivals presented with that name from 2013 to 2022, as well as other events here and there around town. The Covid pandemic resulted in our 2020 festival getting scrapped after we were…
I had previously read Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle novellas, and really enjoyed them. The City in Glass was available at the Seattle Public Library’s Quick Picks shelf, so I couldn’t help but pick it up. It’s published as a stand-alone volume, though in truth it’s somewhere in that borderland between a novella and a…
Yes, it has. So strange how days can take forever to pass, but a decade is gone before you know it. This month represents ten years since I first started my job at the University of Washington, and I’m not sure if this tenure is an accomplishment or just a sign of how much I’m…
Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but it used to be that the division between mainstream fiction and science fiction was a pretty hard boundary, and not many writers from the mainstream side ventured into SF. Quite a few SF writers managed to publish outside the genre, sometimes under different names, but there weren’t many who went the…
I don’t always dream about music, and when I do, I don’t always remember it very well when I wake up. There have been a few cases where I’ve written a piece of music that largely originated from what I remember of a dream. There are a couple of notable ones that predate the start…
There’s a whole lot of crazy going down in the world today, so maybe it’s good to take a moment to appreciate something that’s not crazy, and is in fact quite beautiful. This morning was very clear in Seattle, and also quite cold. But that means — as we say in these parts — the…
I am one of the many science fiction fans who enjoyed Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, though I won’t give it an unreserved recommendation. I’ve also read some of his short fiction, with similar feelings. So when I came across Supernova Era in a used book store, I figured “What the heck?” and…
2025 is bringing many changes to the world. Is it moving backwards to start a new site on WordPress? Maybe, but some things just work. That’s one of my favorite pictures from my time in China. Nanguan Park in Beijing. When I lived in Beijing, and for a time afterwards, I kept a blog of…
This is a continuation of the post from 10 October 2010. And to continue with my visit to the 798 Arts Zone… I visited some of the same galleries as I did years ago, but of course the art works were different now. That artist had a whole series of blurry grey works that didn’t…