Category: 100 Days of Writing

Please Kill Me (Review)

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date April 7, 2018
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 3x5, Advertising, Book Reviews, Brooklyn, Influences, interviews, Music, NYC, Science Fiction, Writing
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Pedro Paramo is the book I’ve most given away. It’s a thin, easy to read, very influential novel. It will haunt you. The second book I’ve most given away is Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Through a series of alternating interviews, PKM traces the history of punk. From New […]

Career Advice to a Molecular Biologist Starting to Write

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date March 22, 2017
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, biotechnology, Journal, synthetic biology, What's Your Bio Strategy?, Writing
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Write and write some more. Read the science media. Fill your head with the best writing you can find. Read The New Yorker. Read annual anthologies of the best writing — not just science writing either. Here’s The Best American Essays of 2016. Practice generating ideas on what to write every day. Especially after you read […]

A Brief, Personal Reading List – Fiction September 2016

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date September 30, 2016
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, biotechnology, Book Reviews, Journal, Observations, Science Fiction, synthetic biology, Writing

I recently shared this reading list with thesalesblog author and sales guru Anthony Iannarino. Anthony’s extremely well read but admitted he didn’t read much fiction. Here’s what I wrote him: I grew up on science fiction and have read a lot of it and admit it’s inspired my career. But I’ve also read a lot […]

Book Review: Ready Player One

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 31, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, Book Reviews, Influences, Writing
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It’s 2044, the world’s a dystopian mess and people escape to, learn, live and work in a virtual world called OASIS (the followup to William Gibson’s cyberspace and Neal Stephenson’s metaverse). At the start of the book, videogame designer James Halliday, the ultimate 1980s geek, leaves his vast fortune to the person who can find […]

Your Founder Is Crazy, Isn’t He? (Part 1)

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 27, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, Advertising, Influences, NYC, Observations

At the beginning of the week, the Founder swore he’d have me back on payroll by the end of the month. It’d been six weeks since any of us had been paid. “What about the options?” I asked. “I’ll take care of those by the end of the week,” he answered. It was the same […]

The Pool at 4 A.M.

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 25, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, biotech in kids books, biotechnology, Influences, Observations, Skateboarding, synthetic biology

My father’s pool is, was, and always will be –– all skaters agree –– absurd. The pale blue surface is very hard, durable, very fast, and sentient. The coping is a great grindable bullnose. The shape is a perfect kidney, just under nine-feet deep. To ride the pool from one lip to the other across […]

Why I Write (Or How I Started Writing)

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 24, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, Influences, Journal, Music, Observations, Skateboarding, Writing

“Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11 year old that could see that potential.” – C.R. Stecyk My first stories were skateboarding stories inspired by C. R. Stecyk‘s Skateboarder Magazine articles, his fabrication and chronicling of the Dogtown’s Z-boys’ […]

20. How To Clone A Dragon 2 | Can We Bioengineer Dragons?

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 23, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, biotech in kids books, biotechnology, synthetic biology

[For Part 1 of this series on How to Clone* a Dragon, click here.] # In the first of her two part post on How to Bioengineer a Dragon, Keira Havens, of Revolution Bioengineering, argues that there should be a compelling reason to modify a living organism to create a dragon. She points out that “it is unlikely […]

Why I Keep A Journal

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 22, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, Book Reviews, Influences, Journal, Observations, Skateboarding, Writing

I’ve been keeping a journal for more than 25 years. I should say “mostly keeping a journal” because there have been periods of time where I haven’t written in a journal regularly – though probably, I was writing just not in a journal. At the pace of one page per day, that’d come to 9,132 pages […]

Book Review: The Dog Stars

Post author By karlschmieder
Post date August 21, 2015
Categories In 100 Days of Writing, 50-Word Epics, book notes, Book Reviews, Writing
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I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction though I’ve read more than a lifetime’s worth and I get why it is popular: We live in a world of uncertainty and great post-apocalyptic stories give us the hope that we can survive the worse of times. Peter Heller’s brilliant The Dog Stars gives us the story of loss, survival, and […]