Continuing series

Published 3 December 2023

Iʼm running a few series on my blog. This page acts as a table of contents
for those series. Iʼll update this page as new posts are published.

Twenty Writers, Twenty Books

My introduction to Twenty Writers, Twenty
Books explains the questionable sanity of
starting this project. In a nutshell: Iʼm writing
about twenty writers whose work has deeply
influenced me—my reading, my writing, and in
life. For each writer I select a representative
book to discuss and analyze.

If you want to follow this series as it develops,

you can watch the posts on the projectʼs topic
page (which also has its own RSS feed).

The list so far:

B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Haruki Murakami, Underground
Studs Terkel, Working
Dashiell Hammett, “The Flitcraft Parable” (from The Maltese Falcon)
(and a second interpretation of the parable)
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, in retrospect (The Push Man and Other Stories)
Peter Bagge, HATE
David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Kurt Vonnegut, Catʼs Cradle
B. R. Myers, A Readerʼs Manifesto
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Writing better fiction with Syd Fieldʼs three-act
screenplay structure
Syd Field made a career out of teaching screenwriters (novice and
professional) how to write movies using his three-act structure. Although
fiction is a separate and unique medium, Iʼve learned a lot from Syd Fieldʼs
paradigm. This series goes over what Iʼve gleaned from Syd Field and how
I adapted his three-act structure to writing fiction.

If you want to follow this series as it develops, you can watch the post on
the projectʼs topic page (which also has its own RSS feed).

Introduction
“The paradigm”
The treatment
Completing the treatment
Now write it again

Computer programming & writing fiction

As a software developer and computer
enthusiast since the 1970s, Iʼm often asked what
similarities exist between programming and
writing fiction. My answer is complicated, and so
Iʼve broken down my answer into a series of blog
posts.

Art as a recruiting poster

Is coding art?
Iterative processes