Tad Williams

Cleaning things is, in my humble opinion, not only time consuming and smelly, but futile and morally questionable. Follow me down this convenient rabbit hole so that I can explain in detail. Watch out for the synecdoche, it’s been known to nip.

Serious People have written books about the end of evolution (e.g., about ten years ago, Peter Ward wrote a detailed account of mass extinctions which muttered darkly about our impending doom, a subject of infinite interest to me . . . if I had my own university, you would be allowed to major in Eschatology). One theory goes that humans...

Yes, it has been a while, hasn’t it? Well, we here in the Grotto are not immune to the vagaries and trip-ups the world places before us.

Thus it is necessary – imperative, really – to eke (eek!) out a little pocket of time, as best we can, by any or most means necessary, for the creative stuff.

As another estimable fantasy scribe, Mister P. Beagle, has said, sometimes the best advice for writers is that they get one’s gluteus on the damned chair and just let it flow, from cerebrum to hand to page/PC screen. Tinkers to Evers to ...

Posted on Jul 01, 2010 | 08:30 PM

I remember reading about a novel once that told the story of a writer who had given up writing. There is nothing groundbreaking about that, since writers give up the most thankless of crafts every second of every day. But his reason was that the world was in such a horrible state that he couldn’t bring himself to create fiction, to waste the energy on it, since it clearly didn’t matter. He was stuck in a state of non-doing, because to write would be an act of selfishness, when all energy should be pointed towards solving the world’s problems. And since no man alone can do that, he did nothi...