Bruce Fergusson

Watch, Read, Listen

  • Ask Geppetto (or Dr. Frankenstein)

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    There’s a quote, attributed to the father of the late novelist, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Sometimes a Great Notion:  “Good writing ain’t necessarily good reading.” Good writing is more easily defined than good reading.  But for me the best measure of a ‘good read’ is when the book–its…

  • Lincoln’s Last Letter

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    Bruce
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    In the movie Lincoln, the president spent part of the last day of his life–April 14, 1865–on an outing with his wife Mary and then later had some business to attend to with members of his cabinet, before hurriedly keeping an appointment with his wife to go to a play at Ford’s Theater. What Spielberg’s…

  • Christmas List

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    Bruce
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    The call came several days before Christmas that year:  a  prominent and respected  New York-based editor of sf/fantasy, whom I’d met through a writing workshop, wanted to buy my novel. As Christmas gifts go, selling a first novel is way up there on the all-time list (though the top spot will always be the December…

  • Hoarding

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                 It’s time for it all to go, all the writerly detritus from a time when King Paper still ruled.  Oh, there will be more, from books as yet unwritten, but there has to be room for it, and presently there isn’t.            There are far too many apple boxes filled with: drafts of…

  • Kleroterias

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    Ancient Greece has often been called the cradle of democracy. Sure, most of the people living in its city-states were not allowed to be citizens, and women couldn’t vote or own property (at least Sparta got the latter right). Still, they had a pretty good thing going, considering the alternatives elsewhere at the time. According…

  • Do-Over

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      I just watched the latest post-apocalypse offering, the first episode of the television series Revolution. They’re giving us a future with lots of swords, crossbows, horses, bad-guy militias, and no electricity (though someone’s secretly holding out on that, so stay tuned). It got me thinking about some of the others in this ‘shit’s hit…

  • The Wall

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      Let’s face it: being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life, someone once said.  Homework has gone from pencils and pens to typewriters to laptops, but a few things haven’t changed.  One is the tyranny of the rectilinear blankness staring you in the face, whether it’s a…

  • Thefts

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    Morgan’s Mill is finally out as an e-book.  A lot of research went into this one and almost as many revisions as the years it rode the bench.   The seed of the original idea came from some family history — maternal ancestors who once owned a small gristmill across the road from their farm in Eastern…

  • Muselair?

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    Bruce
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    It’s one of those names fantasy writers like to use (often too much; I’m guilty of that) instead of a contemporary word—like study, office or library—that might break the spell, setting a reunion of old questing elves in Poughkeepsie, for instance, to mangle Ursula LeGuin’s well-known aphorism. It’s a place where you go to reflect…