I don’t enter writing contests. I’m not comfortable with the whole contest thing but beyond that, there’s usually an entry fee and my reasoning is that I should never be asked to pay for the publication of my words. What would be the point of that? So when I came across what appears to be…

I’d like to share a tip from my partner’s forthcoming book (I hope — though she doesn’t know it yet) on health and weight loss. Her advice is to share your irresistible dessert with a friend. This is how it works. You’re sitting at home, watching your favorite movie and you begin to lust after…

Keep laughing. Don’t just smile with polite restraint – no, laugh as wildly and uncontrollably as you can. Laugh at the hopeless complexity of the problems we face; laugh at the incredible ignorance of our leaders; laugh at the way our freedom has been eroded, reduced to a thought-experience; laugh at the million ways they’re…

For a very long time, I had no desire to write and publish anything, mostly because I thought that I’d nothing to add to the conversation, so to speak. George Orwell had written 1984 and I watched with profound sadness as the predictable torrent of words flowed from the High Tower, starting on New Year’s Day…

You know, there’s this thing that happens to humans when their senses are bombarded with data, to the point of overload. Our brains sorta shut down and we become weird and lethargic, interspersed with irrational fits of anger. But mostly we’re incapacitated. You see it, don’t you? How we’ve become numbed to the outrageous acts…

First off, a bit about me. I was born in the Caribbean, on the island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. I’m what you call in America a black man, though I’ve got some Chinese blood in me, enough to confuse most people at a distance. They see the light skin color and think I must…

So I’m hard at work on my novel, a big sci-fi story about AI and humanity in the future. I’m working on my reading list including a couple of books by Glyn Moody; one on the Internet – rebel code: inside linux and the open source revolution and another on bioinformatics – Digital Code of…

I opened James Lovelock’s most recent book , A Rough Ride to the Future,with a prejudice. I had recently heard him assert that nuclear power plants were probably our best bet for the future. This amazing utterance came as I watched and heard him talk about his life’s work and his most recent conclusions regarding…

You may think of this post as a departure from the blog’s theme – a  look inside my writerly life – but a long time ago I was advised to put everything I had into what I write. I’m a trained historian, with four years of post-graduate study at New York University. I chose to…

I’m very careful about what I believe. I used to tell anyone who’d listen to my rantings that I believed nothing and they should too, but then I learned about Godel’s Theorem and was forced by the demands of logic to admit that there were things I believed without question. There are things which I’m…