In a recent post entitled, The Midnight Library, I hypothesized that because the premise of famous novelist, Matt Haig’s latest book was the same as that of my 2018 novel, closer investigatio… | Continue reading
If kids don’t care about intellectual property, they won’t mind reading books that are rip offs and they won’t think twice about purchasing an essay from an essay writing service.… | Continue reading
Suppose that I have created a new story. It is a tale of reincarnation in which two people’s minds are downloaded into the two halves of a dolphin brain as a form of punishment after they had… | Continue reading
There are books that are written in such a way that they deliberately repel certain types of readers. Consider this book: The first half of this book is virtually meaningless fleshy excess with ver… | Continue reading
Copyright refers to the right to copy something and that generally means that if you need to have the source material sitting in front of you as you create your work, you can be accused of a copyri… | Continue reading
How strange it must have seemed to the authors of Oona out of Order and the Midnight Library that their books had so many unusual similarities. How strange it must have seemed for both books to mak… | Continue reading
Someone once asked me why the concept of a magnetic monopole was so appealing to me and it must be because I like the stillness of a moment frozen in time. The focus on the blur of a timestep alway… | Continue reading
It is said that in a civilized nation, the government has a monopoly on violence, but what if an organization found a way to profit off of state-sanctioned murder? How would that work? For the purp… | Continue reading
Suppose you get fired or quit your job and want to occupy yourself by investing your money. There are some traps you should be aware of that easily ensare a smart person. A smart person might notic… | Continue reading
Three of my five plagiarists got debut book contracts with traditional publishers and I didn’t realize how rare these contracts were. Apparently, there are only 200 debuts each year. What are… | Continue reading
Once upon a time, there was a world in which memories were used as currency. In this world, there were two classes of people, the underclasses and those who were allowed to steal memories from the … | Continue reading
When a book shoots to the top of the NYT bestseller charts in one, miraculous jump, it is either because it is by a famous person or because the system has been gamed. It is well known among publis… | Continue reading
Back in 1954, one year before before Fred Hoyle wrote the science fiction classic, The Black Cloud, the genre of ‘hard science fiction’ or ‘speculative fiction’ had yet to b… | Continue reading
The first thing that every writer asks is, ‘What makes a story good?’ I think I have a satisfactory answer. A good story has multidimensional characters and a flexible focal length that… | Continue reading
The Nobel Prize committee recently provided yet another stellar example of how understanding of the scientific method has broken down at the highest levels. I’m not just complaining about wid… | Continue reading
Chapter 1: Cara Lives Alix thinks I’m dead and buried, but I’ve been reclaimed and repurposed. I wasn’t supposed to remember my past life, but I did. It must’ve been the blu… | Continue reading
In publishing, there are insiders and outsiders. Sara Grant, who I’m sure is a lovely person, is an insider and she was allowed to pass through the pearly gates because of her connections and… | Continue reading
What does it mean to invent a genre? I think it only means that an author is doing original work and if original work has become rare in modern times, I think that is a symptom of a larger problem.… | Continue reading
After reading The Red Labyrinth, I thought a bit about how a scoring system for authors might be used within the publishing industry. Literary agents are supposed to review all of the new work inde… | Continue reading
People love the illusion that they can remove their traumatic burdens by having them seen by everyone, but some things are better left forgotten. Rather they are better conveyed through a distanced… | Continue reading
There are many examples of overlapping plots that do not qualify as examples of plagiarism. The Phantom of the Opera and Sweeny Tod share a number of similarities, but is that number large enough t… | Continue reading
Professional writers know that a new type of book or plot is constructed by weaving stories from the public domain and from real life into a tapestry composed of threads that are either foundationa… | Continue reading
When I started writing my first novel back in 2017, I was doing it to make sense of a world where everything seemed upside down and inside out. I wanted to start a conversation with a world that se… | Continue reading
I’m really struggling right now. I’m usually okay, but sometimes systematic betrayal rattles you or lowers your energy level. Even when it has happened many times before, it still gets … | Continue reading
First editions of Dickens’ work interest me because the prices vary so dramatically. Whereas A Christmas Carol costs 40,000 dollars and Hard Times costs 3,000 dollars, Bleak House, a much lon… | Continue reading
There was a TV cop show called Dragnet when I was a kid and it was about cops watching criminals behave badly only so that they could arrest a larger batch when the time was right. In this way, the… | Continue reading
When I quit my job as a physicist and started writing books, I did it to re-organize my sense of myself and my past. I wanted to impose order upon an inner world that felt disordered. If … | Continue reading
It is so hot today that my brain feels like it is melting and that is why I can’t seem to sharpen up this post. Then again, on some days, melted thoughts may be soothing and spark something u… | Continue reading
The whole flat earth concept has caused me to rethink how people justify their beliefs. Flat earth cosmologists clearly understand that it is possible for something spherical to appear flat if you … | Continue reading
What is the essence of a jellyfish or a hydra? They are both slimy, they both live in water, and they have stinging tentacles. They are both classified as animals, just like a horse. But what is a … | Continue reading
To absorb a completely wrong description of the physics of time travel, watch some YouTube videos on physics or science fiction. The stories you will hear are absolute nonsense. Even the books that… | Continue reading
Staring at the back of the neck of the person lying next to you is often a situation, not a moment. Yet many people today would have a hard time drawing a distinction between those two concepts. I … | Continue reading
I don’t smoke, but my husband does, so I’m quite interested in the stories about how four times fewer people who smoke end up in the hospital with coronavirus, but if they are admitted,… | Continue reading
Medical diagnostic imaging is highly dependent on the operator because whenever a radiologist looks at a set of MRI images or CAT scans, he or she will adjust the contrast and select a handful of i… | Continue reading
Today, I watched a woman train her dog by restricting his access to his favorite toy. She threw the toy into the water and let him jump in to get it. When he came back, she took the toy away and se… | Continue reading
In a recent post entitled, The Midnight Library, I hypothesised that because the premise of famous novelist, Matt Haig’s latest book was the same as that of my novel which was published two y… | Continue reading
I must admit that spin 2 gravitons make no concrete sense to me as fundamental particles because they seem to be composed of more fundamental sub-components. I can imagine fundamental concepts for … | Continue reading
Science popularizers are guilty of providing a bad education when they promote the idea that there are new, special people who are coming up with new ideas rather than redi… | Continue reading
When we create an idealized or demonized image of ourselves or of the opposite sex, we may change how the object of our attention acts or looks, thereby bringing to life the image we have created &… | Continue reading
There was a TV cop show called Dragnet when I was a kid and it was about cops watching criminals behave badly only so that they could arrest a larger batch when the time was right. In this way, the… | Continue reading
First editions of Dickens’ work interest me because the prices vary so dramatically. Whereas A Christmas Carol costs 40,000 dollars and Hard Times costs 3,000 dollars, Bleak House, a much lon… | Continue reading
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and did you ever wonder what 60 hours corresponded to? It corresponds to the number of hours that the moon spends in each sign of the zodiac… | Continue reading
The scariest virus I’ve ever heard of is called the myoxma virus and it only kills rabbits, even though people who handle rabbits are often infected with no symptoms. For rabbits, the virus c… | Continue reading
I’ve been reading a novel that was published in 1966, during the golden era of communist Russia, and it gives a portrait of how fragile people’s mental health can become within a system… | Continue reading
When I quit my job as a physicist and started writing books, I did it to re-organize my sense of myself and my past. I wanted to impose order upon an inner world that felt disordered. Whe… | Continue reading
It is so hot today that my brain feels like it is melting and that is why I can’t seem to sharpen up this post. Then again, on some days, melted thoughts may be soothing and spark something u… | Continue reading
A while back, I wrote a post on Sunspots and Eclipses that caught the attention of an astronomy blogger named Tallbloke. He has an interesting perspective about the solar system that is worth passi… | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered how certain, new authors get hundreds of Amazon and Goodreads reviews? It turns out that if you spend 100 bucks on Netgalley and 100 bucks on Booktasters, you will get ten re… | Continue reading