Author: KMc

Hello all,

Many of you know that I’m an F&SF writer and have expressed an interest in my work. By happy coincidence I just got a note on my latest short story publication.

It’s humorous SF and it’s in the latest issue of Cosmic SF. Unlike most of the venues that buy my stuff, Cosmic is an electronic magazine and currently available for free in PDF format via the above link. It’s one my older stories, written in 1997, but I’m still quite fond of it.

For people who are interested in a completely different sort of SF, currently also free, a cycle of stories that I wrote as part of a middle school science curriculum is available in PDF format. These stories are primarily designed to convey specific ideas in physical science and scientific reasoning. I think they’re fun, but they’re not what you’d call representative of my wider body of work.

In order to get there, go to http://interactionste.net/ then click on the link http://cipskids.sdsu.edu/ and fill in the username and password visible on the bottom of that first page (http://interactionste.net/) then one more click on the link labeled “Chronicles of the Wandering Star” and there you are.

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(Warning, BFD-big fat diary)

As some of you know I was recently asked to join an organization that’s trying to work on progressive message coordination and formulation statewide in Wisconsin. I thought some of the same ideas that I’m working on over there might be useful to a broader community and so decided to post the initial plan on Booman, both to see if people are interested in using some of those ideas here and to get input on how to refine them.

After poking through their site and thinking a bit I decided that the best thing I could do was help set up a forum for collaboratively building progressive letters to the editor and aggregating talking points.

I’m currently calling it bullet points and I see it as a place where people could drop aggregated, research-based talking points on a specific topic like say the Plame investigation in the form of quotes and single sentence summaries. It’s not quite posting letters and not quite framing, but somewhere in the land between, call it framed letter templates.

The following is long, but illustrative. Here are five of my letters to the editor published in the Dunn County News with the generalizable bullet points extracted for reuse in other sorts of letter. Each of the bullet points has a set of topics attached to the end with the idea that letters in these areas could use these examples as reinforcement. These were all built around Hurricane Katrina and the Federal response, but all have useful points for other arguments.

I’ll discuss how the idea might play out here at Booman below the letters.

More on the flip

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Dear Republican Neighbors, I’m asking you for a favor. Please, please, please write to your leaders in Washington and ask them to take a break. Three weeks, a month, two. Now, I’m not asking this because of...

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Tom Delay Indicted On Wednesday the 28th, Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay was indicted for conspiracy involving money laundering and he stepped down. I can already hear the Republican apologist brigade warming up to...

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Why “tone” is important: Tone = Framing Framing is in its essentials a way of choosing the right words, the “tone” to convey your point in a way that will convince people to agree with you. One of the key...

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