About
Your Host
I’m Michael Smith and I live in the north central Piedmont of North Carolina in the USA.
The Writing Life
I have pretensions of a literary nature and work almost every day at improving my writing skills. The goal is to be able to write fiction that I’d enjoy reading, which is a pretty high bar if I say so myself since I was spoiled early on Asimov, Tolkien and LeGuin. I’m interesting in writing good science fiction, historical fiction and fantasy because I find them entertaining but also because my experience suggests that through stories in those genres we may come closer to understanding the great Truths than by reading so-called realistic fiction. But more than either of those, it’s just fun playing what-if? and watching where the thoughts wander.
Having worked at this stuff on and off for over ten years, this year I finally decided to bite the bullet and commit to spending the time and money to attend Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp if I could get in. I submitted a writing sample and was pleasantly surprised to be selected. After the two-day workshop was over, I and fourteen other aspirants remained for another three and a half days of intensive writing, reading and critiquing. Mr. Card’s most telling statement about my writing was, “Mike you somehow seem to have avoided writing all the important scenes!“. He also pointed out that I was writing in the cinematic point of view instead of the limited third person as I thought. Both of these observations led to a lot of reflection on my part and I think my writing is improving for it.
So now I participate in the Hatrack River Writers’ Workshop along with most of my fellow boot campers and in the Codex Writers’ Group with a few of them. Both are serious critiquing groups–they’ll tell you what’s not working!
The Day Job and my Twitter Feed
My job as a teacher of information systems and operations management at the collegiate level leads me to spend about two hours every day reading, viewing and listening to keep up with advances in science and technology. I enjoy sharing some of the items I find most interesting.
I keep an eye out for anything concerning sustainable development and living since those are special applications of technology that I like to learn about.
No politics. No religion. No far-future speculation or reports on research that is decades away from practical application. And no human interest fluff.
The corresponding twitter feed is @Mikes0783.
Curator is probably the most overused term on the Web right now, by the way.