Back of the Envelope

Black Gate has published the first part of my short novel in their online fiction series today, and will be publishing the rest over the ne...

For the past week, I've received dozens, if not hundreds, of emails purporting to confirm my registration at one online forum or other. ...

You may have noticed that there are no posts on this blog between July of 2004 and December of 2009.  You may be wondering what's up wi...

I recently put my short story, "A Stranger in the Library," up on Amazon as a Kindle e-book.  "A Stranger in the Library...

My wife and I saw Looper  the other day.  Unlike Doc Rampage , we were able to suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie.  It was...

I've put up an author page on Amazon .  It's pretty empty so far, as I wait until it finishes processing the short stories I'm s...

Black Gate has announced that it will now be publishing fiction online.  Which is exciting, especially since one of the first stories they...

I heard once that there are more flintknappers today than there ever were at any other time in history.  In other words, today's popul...

Kristin's finally put up her recipe for conditum paradoxum: As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the things my husband Donal...

Last weekend, Kristin and I went down to Louisiana, where my sister, Rebekah, was getting married.  It was a simple, and relatively inexpens...

The name of this blog is "Back of the Envelope".  One of my earliest blog posts was a long explanation about why I named the blo...

I find Dean Koontz's books either hit or miss. Some of them, like Seize the Night and From the Corner of His Eye , are beautiful, well...

On Saturday, Kristin and I hosted a Ancient Roman dinner for our friends.  We've done Roman dinners before, as Kristin has discussed in ...

I loved Dan Wells's I am not a Serial Killer  series, so when I saw that he had a new book out in the same genre, I snapped it up.   Th...

This is an issue I've been thinking about some, especially in the context of stories on the web.  How long of a webpage is too long?  Wh...

I've been ignoring all the little improvements that Google has been making to Blogger for a while now. But recently I decided that it w...

Amazon has announced its new Kindles, including three new Kindle Fires, and two new e-ink Kindles.  I'm not going to review them here, j...

This past weekend, Kristin and I went to Worldcon 70.  Worldcon is one of the bigger non-profit science fiction conventions, and probably th...

Everyone knows how important first impressions are. Fair or not, the first impression you make tends to form the filter through which all ...

The Dark Knight Rises , the final movie in Christopher Nolan's Batman saga, lies under the dark cloud of the tragedy that took place on ...