On Common Errors in Fiction

Andromeda Spaceways, the Australian SF magazine, has a helpful and amusing article by Douglas A. Van Belleon on the most common reasons they reject a story. Pretty accurate and comprehensive list of reasons your story might not be working (though I've added one additional suggestion in the comments section). Worth a look!

Writing the Literary Novel

Excellent advice in Suzanne Reisman's Ten Tips to Write a Novel That's Literary as F—", amusingly expressed. The article does include a certain, um, Joycian quality—which is to say,
LANGUAGE WARNING: NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK.
But I've had to correct one or more of these issues in every manuscript across my desk. Including my own.

Robert, Editing

My wife (seen here reflected in the mirror in the background) caught this candid shot of me editing. Clearly, I love my job.

Bahahahaha!

Also, I tend to lose track of time, and apparently hadn't noticed that the sun had gone down and I was now working in the dark.

Excellence for What?

Very pleased to have a chapter in the just released Routledge collection, Global Perspectives on Teaching Excellence entitled "Excellence for what? Policy Development and the Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education." The collection is basically a reaction to recent legislation in the UK that attempted to measure and mandate teaching excellence in higher education. My wife and I wrote a critique using my discourse analysis model of the purpose of higher education applied to the new legislation to suggest that the government's definition of 'excellence' might be somewhat problematic from the perspective of students and learning.

Of course, discourse analysis is a large part of academic editing, so it's nice to be able to keep my hand in original research/publication to be part of this excellent collection.