Search Results for: Letters from Love

Books!

This year I have published seven books. Three are reissues of books in print, but four are newly out this year. It seems an insane achievement, like the time when I was terrified of heights but still I climbed on an open staircase to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral dome. I really loved St…. Read More

Is Civilization the Problem?

When it first occurred to me that civilization might be the problem rather than the solution, I chuckled at my own silliness. It was the 1970s. After having just lived through the turmoil of the sixties, I was feeling that we had gone-off track, and my little thought-experiment in living without the trappings of civilization… Read More

Human Nature

Physicists do thought-experiments. Using everything you know about how certain things would work in certain situations, you shift some of the variables in your mind and see what happens then. I didn’t know that scientists do thought-experiments when I started thought-experimenting in the mid-seventies, but I discovered then – surprisingly – that experimenting in your… Read More

Characters

The biggest lesson I had to learn about writing fiction is that the writer doesn’t write the story. Instead, these supposedly fictional people come alive at some point, and they take over. If the writer won’t let that happen, the story dies on the page. It was Pearl Buck who made me want to learn… Read More

Accepting Design

Two and two are four, Four and four are eight, Eight and eight are sixteen, Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two… Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds, You and your arithmetic, you’ll likely go far. Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds, Seems to me you’d stop and see how lovely they are.  Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds, With… Read More