Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 2
July 15, 2025
Writing, Cooking, and a bit of Walking
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! So nice to see you! I blog therefore I am. You read (and like) and therefore you are? I have no idea. But I’d like to hope you are real: an audience of bots and AI scraping around for usable data that isn’t already AI generated would be …
July 8, 2025
Restraint and Discernment : A Writer’s Thoughts for the Week
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This blog brought to you by Florence and the Machine’s High as Hope album. And some of Ceremonials. What The Water Gave Me is fantastic. Two big thoughts this week. (Not legitimately big, just the two discrete subjects I want to briefly discuss. Discreetly.) 1) The internet can …
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July 1, 2025
Riffing on Writing as an Art and Craft – Inspiration in the face of AI Impersonation
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I missed last week. I thought about putting out a quick blast for the sake of keeping up with weekly output, but decided not to. Better silence than thoughtless blather, I hope! I have been watching lots of writerly videos on You Tube this week. Yes, this is …
June 17, 2025
Riffing on the Stylish Voice of Conviction
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! A quick one this week, on a thorny subject. What, my friends, is style? Do cats have it with abundance? In writing style seems to be both sought after, and discounted, if you listen to the wild warblings available on the once world wide web. It is both …
June 11, 2025
Nothing to write? Read a Classic
The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely …
June 3, 2025
Imagined History, Anticipated Rewrites, and Optimism
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have a good week. I hope you have had one too. Now, on the eve of returning to work, I wish I had more time off. Isn’t that always the way? Too much time spent looking at the screen upon which I now type. But, I spent …
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May 27, 2025
Keeping the light of Wonder alive
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Do you, like me, sometimes wonder where the wonder went? Did it disappear in a puff of wonderment? When I decide to watch a random streaming flick, I often look for a ‘space’ movie. Something set out there, big enough to give that sense of wonder you would …
May 20, 2025
Hyperfactual transmission: A new origin for an old phrase
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Pusillanimous. A long time ago a girl asked me what word she was thinking. I said pusillanimous, thinking it a fancy word she’d be deeply unlikely to be thinking (and which I didn’t understand the meaning of, I just liked the way it sounded, an upmarket purple of …
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May 13, 2025
What to write next? Time to trust the artistic gut
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I’ve been doing some thinking recently. (Don’t we all? Don’t we all engage in thinking constantly? What does that phrase really mean, when you think about it?) I’ll start again. I have been engaging in a form of creative introspection recently. Life has been throwing distractions and stresses …
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May 6, 2025
Riffing on the future past, a spacefaring earthbound dystopia of AI proportions. Guest appearance by the inevitable G. Orwell.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I had a daydream about a spacefaring story, complete with prolonged dialogue exchange and random bad technological ideas. It was terrible, but fun to go with for a while, comparing Tom Waits’ and Nicholas Cage’s Renfields (there was a reason to do with insects and vegetarianism – I …
