A World of Speculation

A little history close to home

At 160 years old, Oregon City is the oldest town in Oregon. For those who read this blog in other, more ancient places, that’s laughably young, and yet it has some oddities about it that make it unique in the United States. First, unlike many of its...

Plot point or pinch point?

I wrote about this topic earlier, but it keeps coming up. Suddenly, when I face my own troubles, I find myself asking, “Is this a plot point or a pinch point?” A plot point is when the protagonist comes to the end of his resources, when the goal he has...

Insights from the Profile page

The New! and Improved! Blogger! has added a profile page, which provides a piece of information that is at once encouraging and scary: In the 7-8 months I’ve written this blog (since October ’03), I’ve posted 52,932 words in 196 posts. If it were a...

A novel without those tiresome verbs

A new French “novel”–more accurately a 233-page book of non-nonfiction–makes the news because it’s written without any verbs: “I am like a car driver,” the author said, “who has smashed the windscreen so he cannot see...