Fall Classic time

Well, I’ll admit with no regrets that I did not complete the 50,000 words of fiction necessary to “win” during November’s National Novel Writing Month. Some other realities intervened. I wrote a little over 25,000 words on The Distributive Passions, some of which is up on the site. (I may have covered the other half in other writings.) Winner or not, I had a very good time trying, and the pressure of trying to get ready for a month of sustained writing did wonders for my overall sense of where the novel is going. I did manage to write a […]

The Distributive Passions, my fiction project, will return in The Mutualist #2 — “Owning Up,” but, for now, I’m going to leave KAli to fend for herself in the far future, and get back to Gabriel Solly and more contemporary concerns. Gabe’s world is my idea-workshop, the place I go when I need to work out the practical implications of theoretical concerns. It’s a world where lots of little things went differently than they have in our own—and many things worked out in very much the same ways. Fourier ended up with the prominence of Marx—and vice versa. Agassiz was […]

As some of you know, I’ve been playing with an alternate-history project for awhile. The Distributive Passions is “Fourierist speculative fiction, with a mutualist message,” or something like that. I’m treating it as a place to make speculations about the implications and possibilities of the socialist and libertarian histories which occupy so much of my scholarly time, and to make some broader, less scholarly statements about people, how they interact, and what happens when they try to change the world. Having worked on various outlines and character descriptions, and having found it hard to keep it all straight in my […]