One true thing about writing fiction
Back in 2013, after converting one long book into two shorter sci-fi fantasy novels, knocking out a voodoo potboiler and entertaining myself with a silly romp called “Another Goddamn Novel About The Collapsing Quantum Multiverse,” my most recent Bataan...
One hundred and thirty-eight days
The first skirmish in the “President Puts Kids in Cages and Lies About It” scandal ended yesterday with a tactical retreat by the White House and little else. More than 2,000 immigrant children are still in cages. Trump’s executive order just sets up...
In all but narrowest sense, Trump is the target
Part of the game we’re all playing right now (and let’s be clear: Our role in the game is “public opinion,” which means what we believe is insignificant except in the aggregate) is “Who are the targets of the Mueller Investigation?”...
U.S. soccer’s future is expansion, not World Cups
Beau Dure, a Virginia sportswriter, has a column in The Guardian this morning (Why the US men will never win a World Cup — and that’s OK). It’s an entirely acceptable restatement of the current consensus among American soccer writers, a relatively...
Muddling through decline, happily
Today’s long but thought-provoking read is Dylan Matthews’ “The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy/It feels like this moment in history deserves a definitive ending. It won’t get one,” at Vox....
2018 Black Sheep Manor ag plan
For those of you keeping score at home, here’s the run-down on the current state of the 2018 BSM food-raising plan. BACKGROUND In 2016, we cleared an overgrown, eroded field that I calculate at about 0.30 of an acre. We made a vegetable garden on about 2k square...
The Republic is doomed. Here’s why.
While searching today for the answer to a relatively simple question (“After three-fifths of the Senate votes for cloture, can the bill itself pass on a simple majority of those present during the vote?”) I was reminded of what should be the most obvious...
Blaming the Dreamers: How we reached shutdown
I participated in a thread this morning that reminded me how little I actually knew about how we got to this shutdown impasse, which is generally being described in the press as being about an Obama-era policy called DACA. Fox News is tending to frame the impasse in...
Thrown overboard into a cold, dark sea
In 1620, an indentured servant named John Howland climbed the rigging aboard a ship called the Mayflower in the middle of a storm and was violently thrown overboard. As the 28-year-old plunged toward certain death, his hand touched a rope that had come loose from the...
Get ready: The crisis is almost upon us
If President Trump fires Special Counsel Robert Mueller — which I believe he has already decided to do once there’s no other way of avoiding pending criminal charges — then 2018 is shaping up to be a year of national crisis like no living American...
Dan Conover
Howdy
Howdy! This is my current blog, and the best place to find out about our ongoing adventures here at rustic Black Sheep Manor. It’s also not a bad place to keep track of the work on my latest novel, find out more about my first four books, and otherwise just generally browse whatever happens to be flitting through my mind at any given moment. You can also find me on social media via the links below, get all sorts of information on my previous incarnations via my personal website here, or mainline directly into my index of media futurism essays here. Thanks for stopping by.