Tim Donlan

Apocalyptic Interstate

Hemmingway dealt with plenty of horrors in his life – gouges and scrapes from bullfights and deep sea fishing, even the trenches of World War One. But he always had redemptive escapes nearby – Spanish villas, rugged African hills, Florida’s warm waters. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy has essentially written a

New Blooms

Shots of: Toronto, Central Park, Harriman State Park (2 snakes!), and the upper west side over the last few months.

The Knifer

The Knifer: The net was down and Rahim was stuck. The grey light from the rafters chunked into discrete bits, lines in the grime, delineated like the packets that just wouldn’t go down the wire. Frustrated, he stood, pushed away from the dead jack, rubbed his streaking arms. The

Novelistic Alchemy

It was a dubious prospect that I could maintain a book-a-month pace reading something as monstrous as Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion. It took me a good 6-7 weeks to trudge through his previous offering – Quicksilver. But Neal has honed his quill this time, resulting in a more streamlined tale.

Ice Melts (Finally)

First months in New York ~

Fishing for Tales

I’ve neglected the page like a chore, even a virus, when instead I should be scrawling text in torrents. I’m here, in New York City, a place of a million faces, a billion stories. They race like silver fish under a glassy sea. I can’t help but

The Gunslinger

It was one of those cheap paperback reprints with the flimsy bindings, pulp for the bestseller mill. Still, I figured I better sample Steven King’s Dark Tower series, the horror-writer’s own foray into epic fantasy. King himself attributes Tolkien and the trilogy that kicked it all off as

New Tunes

Explosions in the Sky – All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone The Texas crew stays true to their roots but broadens their instrumental horizons, incorporating piano, mandolin and even some electronic ambience. Almost an inverse of their previous work, Birth and Death of the Day starts with a grumbling guitar

Waxwing Slain

When you think of Russian novelists, what immediately springs to mind is a dour, serious-minded, bearded intellectual, writing about moral law in a frigid land of extremes. Vladimir Nabokov doesn’t really fit that bill, for one (beardless), and two, he’s an American immigrant, fleeing the Russian revolution and

The Move (Photographed)

Noted

Apparently, HBO execs had a similar idea to mine and decided that Song of Ice and Fire would make a great series: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117957532.html?categoryid=14&cs=1 [http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117957532.html?categoryid=14&cs=1] Needless to say I’m excited.

Gold Rush

A few months back I wrote about the comparison between Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Sopranos, likening the political world of knights and kings to Mafioso. I promised an update when I got around to watching the latest ‘reinterpretation’ of the Wild West: Deadwood. The

The Cat who Walks through Worlds

The first in my stack of Christmas gift novels was Charles Stross’s Accelerando. Definitely a fun read, one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read since I finished Stephenson’s Diamond Age a few years back. The title refers to the singularity, the point where technological acceleration becomes

New Year

So it’s a New Year, and with it some pretty big changes. Recently married, on the verge of a large move, a host of never-ending responsibilities, the reluctant acquiescence of less and less free time. Regardless, perseverance has a few perks, one of them: crisp (somewhat unclean) first drafts.

Last of 2006

The Kite Runner

I remember a character on the Sopranos once saying something along the lines of: “America is the only country people expect to be happy. Everywhere else they expect to be unhappy and are surprised when they aren’t.” It’s a fitting theme for Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, The

New Tunes

I’ve needed fuel these last weeks for long hours of word-craft. Three (relatively) new records have kept me going, moving me to a mood somewhere between dismal and driven. Godspeed You! Black Emperor Yanqui U.X.O. Nixing the sampled weirdness of their previous efforts (Lift your skinny fist)

A lack of Chlorophyll

Song of Knights and Gangsters

Recently I finished the fourth book of Song of Ice and Fire – Feast for Crows. I’ve also been binging on old Sopranos seasons (up to season 4). As different as they are, these two staples of their respective genres are remarkably similar. In fact, I’d go so far

Threepeat

Tomorrow it begins again – the month of November, and with it NaNoWriMo. This will be my third year. In 2004 I had a bit of beginner’s luck, and knocked off 50k words of The War Inside (then another 30k in December). Last year I went somewhat over my head,

Back

Edit: Extent of earthquake – no power first night and everything at the airport delayed. Felt like a third world country. Convenience stores were letting in one customer at a time to prevent looting, which meant 2 hour+ lines. Had to scrounge up a dinner in the darkened streeks of Wikiki

Anthropology on the Net

Being that I don’t visit remote cultures and commune with primitive tribes, you would think anthropology would be the last thing on my mind. But I’ve realized that I do spend an almost excessive amount of time in the company of strange characters – the denizens of internet message

Autumn Encroaches

The summer of the final year was one of foliage and blooms, fiery fronds reaching up to the golden sun in playful arcs

Seventeenth Century Sci Fi

When you read an exceptionally long novel, the nuances of prose and character become almost ingrained, so remembrance of a time they were not known is difficult to recall. Such is the case with Quicksilver, the first of Neal Stephenson’s massive Baroque Cycle. It seems as though I’ve

Spammers Pillage Classic Novels

Looks like text from the Project Gutenberg archives can bypass the Google Spam filter. I received a standard spam for a pump-and-dump penny stock scam today containing some strange prose. Turns out its the text of a 1928 novel by Joseph C. Lincoln called Silas Bradford’s Boy [http://gutenberg.