Author Archives: Gene Stewart

About Gene Stewart

Born 7 Feb 1958 Altoona, PA, USA Married 1980 Three sons, grown Have lived in Japan, Germany, all over US Currently in Nebraska I write, paint, play guitar Read widely Wide taste in music, movies Wide range of interests Hate god yap Humanist, Rationalist, Fortean Love the eerie

This Just In From the Trenches –

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An Invitation To a Mud Bath

Famous writers aren’t as famous as celebrities from other walks of life, such as actors or rock stars. There are exceptions to the Known By Looks stuff, such as Neil Gaiman doing a rock star image and Donna Tartt’s actor … Continue reading

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Are You An Imaginary Playmate? A Non-Playable Character? A Monetized Cluster of Pixels?

Distressed because a familiar face from a media feed has gone dark? Y’know, TV personalities, movie stars, online images, all are interchangeable. Having an emotional attachment to an image is self-sabotage, a sucker’s bet, notwithstanding “Pictures of Lilly” by The … Continue reading

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Let History Stand (So We Can Learn From It)

Regarding censorship and bowdlerizing older books etc. —  Correcting errors is necessary to present a better book and is not censorship or bowdlerizing. Copyediting is entirely ethical, and improves the work. It is not ethical to change published work. If … Continue reading

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Hemming and Hawing

If Hemingway hadn’t put that macho gloss on things, he’d have been revealed as an aesthete, something his upbringing didn’t let him admit, even to himself perhaps. He was at core sensitive, finely-tuned, and delicate, not attributes one associates with … Continue reading

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My Toon Path

My own stuff usually sprawls between Larson and Thurber, with the occasional Kliban influence.  I’d also have to cite Schultz, to be fair, along with the Nine Old Men at Disney Animation, particularly during THE JUNGLE BOOK epoch, which was … Continue reading

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What About Us?

Literary writers often cherrypick tropes and topoi from pulp to spark plot, then fail to follow through. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike is a good first third of a Stephen King novel, but he didn’t follow through on … Continue reading

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Renewed As Always

In the Romantic Era, when artists and writers recoiled from some of the harshness brought by the Age of Reason, a beautiful, terminally-ill young woman, doomed, a tubercular Venus, was considered the most poignant of topics for art. Beauty and … Continue reading

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Eyes Have Us

Stalkers forget the touch of regard. Being observed is sensed as a spider web brushing across the back of the neck, a feather tickling the spine, an urge to look behind or around yourself. Gooseflesh spreads. Special Ops troops are … Continue reading

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A Pachinko Through My Reading and Writing History

Expanded from comments posted to CarolynMarieReads on  Youtube’s book tube on 25 Oct 2527 — My mother would give me a mmpb in my Easter Basket, and I believe the first one ever was Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. From … Continue reading

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