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MLR

MLR / Male / UK

Ask me about early-type galaxy scaling relations
Commissions: Closed
Trades: Closed
Requests: Closed
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New book out

My new novel, "The Way to the Lonely Valley", is available for purchase via Fenris Publishing: http://www.fenrispublishing.com/lerenard The full plot summary is available there, if interested. The book is a light fantasy narrative I wrote the first draft of more than a decade ago, as my first succe…

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New novel being published

Allow me to stir up the maggots a little on this account and announce, to whomever might be reading, that Fenris Publishing has agreed to publish a short novel of mine. All parties have signed the contract, and the manuscript is with the editor right now for a first pass. Here's the blurb I used wh…

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On Disruption

Hi. I'm Tech Man, founder of Innovative Innovations Inc., and I'm here today to tell you about an exciting new idea that will change the way you look at transportation. On founding this company, I came to a simple realization: no matter who you talk to, in no matter what part of the world, when you…

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Nostalgia Critic and What Is Good Criticism

I guess the whole world is up in arms over one Doug Walker's latest creation: his video about Pink Floyd's "The Wall". I've been thinking for some time about maybe expositing on criticism and critique, so now seems like a pretty good opportunity, as the linked video I think is an interesting case s…

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Good ol' FA

So I see FA is down again. I notice every time this happens, the Weasyl Twitter account sends out a handful of messages reminding people about various features that Weasyl has, in what appears to be a more and more pitiful attempt at getting FA users to switch [back]. Then FA comes back online and…

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The misery of long projects

As the (to astronomical precision) ~0 people who read some of the words I write in places like this know, I have technically been working on my novel for around 15 years. I say technically because the first draft of it, other than eventually having the same protagonist as it currently has, was abso…

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When astronomers attack (each other)

I'd like to talk a bit about an astronomy story some folks may have seen floating around the news some time ago, and have likely forgotten about. There's a nearby galaxy, catalogued as KKS[2000]04 (after the Karachentsev catalog), which a team led by one Pieter van Dokkum recently argued has no dar…

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A bit on Kyell Gold

Does including that name in the title of a post on a furry website count as clickbait? Ah, well, whatever. I finished reading Kyell Gold's Green Fairy very recently. Despite its length, it didn't take me particularly long to get through, because Kyell has that same gift as authors like J.K. Rowling…

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Story in upcoming anthology for those interested

If anyone is going to Anthrocon, I have a new story appearing in the Exploring New Places anthology from FurPlanet, which is debuting there. It's about two hyper-intelligent lizards stuck in an abandoned research facility on Mars needing to go fix the facility's failing power plant. For a change of…

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Review of "The Digital Coyote" and brief digression on the Coyotl Awards

So I just finished reading The Digital Coyote, by Kris Schnee. Up front I will say I'd never heard of this book or the series it was part of prior to picking it up. I bought it solely because it won Best Novel in the 2016 Coyotl Awards: http://coyotlawards.org/2016-2/ You guys already know I'm very…

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Anyone want to help me workshop a story?

I've finished a draft of a short story I'm actually considering submitting places for publication. It's a reworking of a story I originally submitted to the first ever FWG Anthology, but after feedback from the anthology's jurors and a couple of days sitting on it I realized it wasn't as brilliant…

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The SCIENCE of pop science

There's something that bugs me about organizations or TV shows or YouTube channels or what have you that purport to proselytize the wonders of science to the masses. Because I'm in a mood, I'm going to attempt to articulate that right now. What got me thinking about this again was, I was bored and…

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A bit about writing furry characters

"Humans in furry suits", I think was the quote. Or "humans in animals suits", or something like that. It got bandied around a lot back when I was still involved with the furry writing community. I started to think about it again recently when I picked up a book that's been sitting untouched in my K…

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I have a PhD

Yep. Totally bragging over here, but as of this afternoon I passed my dissertation defense. All 0.6 people who still pay attention to this account may now refer to me as "Doctor". I won't stop you. ;-)

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Quantum mechanics explains everything?

I heard this neat idea on Big Picture Science the other day (a great radio show, by the way, that gets into reasonable discussion of lots of new ideas in science and technology), that life might be a byproduct of quantum mechanics. Something about how the universe acts like a quantum computer... I…

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Astronomy is an international enterprise

List of countries where I'm applying for astronomy postdoctoral research positions: USA Chile Germany Canada China Japan South Korea Taiwan Finland Australia By the way, if anyone cares, most of my time these days has been sucked up by these job applications, on top of my usual duties working on fi…

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More about issues with writing

Still putzing away slowly at my current project. I ran into a funny issue, something that pops up in rough drafts of mine (where I'm creating the copy from scratch or just from an outline), and I was curious if anyone else has encountered it. Maybe I'll call it "levels of creativity". Creativity in…

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Stepping down as admin

Well, I've been doing this admin thing at Weasyl for about 4 years now, but unfortunately the time has come for me to resign and start acting like a normal user of the site. Fact is, I'm in the last year of graduate school, and so I need to both work hard to finish up my thesis on time, get prepped…

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I should do a commission or two again

Does anyone want anything drawn for them? I've technically been open for commissions this whole time, though I haven't advertised it a whole lot. I've got prices and other info on my profile page, which are always open to discussion. I'm only bringing this back up now because I've recently had some…

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Some More Writing Blog

Happy Holidays, tout le monde. I know it's been a while, but I've actually been giving the final pass to Part One. It seems there's a few stages, here: sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word editing (is the language good), then chapter-by-chapter editing (is each chapter cohesive, are there still plot…

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Writing Blog Part Whatever

I've been thinking about trust some, lately. Mostly in the context of, you know how when you start reading something, and immediately something about it turns you off? Then it seems like from that point on, you have two options: either you stop reading it right away and never think on it again, or…

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New work by Poetigress coming out

Just in case anyone who's following me isn't also following poetigress (though you really should be), her new novel The Huntress is available for preorder. Link to submission detailing this Looks like you should go to this page for more details: http://www.reneecarterhall.com/huntress.html PT is an…

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Writing Blog -- cont.

Part of the difficulty I'm having is that for large chunks of this book, I find myself once again completely rewriting everything, since for large chunks of it I haven't actually touched it since about three or four years ago. And I don't know about anyone else, but I can't write a terrific draft o…

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Writing blog -- cont.

Back from vacation. I've been attempting this thing, with dialogue, wherein if two animal-people are talking to each other, and both belong to a species that has a very sensitive nose, I try to work that aspect of their lives into the dialogue. Essentially this means a lot of things go unsaid, at l…

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Mostly out of contact for next 9 days

This is mostly with regard to my Admin duties: I'm taking a road trip around Vermont, and will be out of contact for most of the trip. So if you have questions related to the site, to a report you made, or other such things, you will want to contact one of the other admins or moderators: https://ww…

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Writing blog -- cont.

Sometimes it's real hard to muster up the energy to try to get over road blocks. It's one of those things where you work hard to get something right, you wait a day, you realize you failed, you start over, you fail again, you sit on it for another couple days mulling it over, you try again, and the…

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Writing blog -- cont.

Interactive time. So I sat for a while today not writing, but thinking about something, and I haven't come up with a terribly good solution to the problem yet. Therefore, I decided to puke my thoughts out here, both to elicit suggestions and to spark something in my own brain by writing the argumen…

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Writing Blog --cont.

I've been noticing as I go that if I take a break for more than a day or two, I seem to lose track of the writing style I'd been using, and have to go back and read a good chunk of what I'd written up to that point to get back on it. Particularly this occurred to me this morning, as I spent about a…

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Writing blog

Might as well write the occasional blog here while I'm working on the novel. For a while before I started this latest round of edits, I worried a lot about language and flow and things like that, and how to make an interesting story that's also creatively written. I guess one work that really got m…

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The problem with writing novels...

...is that they take so long to write. So, after traveling to Flagstaff, Arizona, then to the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, then Sydney Australia and Cairns Australia, and then back and forth from Tucson and Cleveland three times this year on some of the most soul-draining, bad-weather observing runs…

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Shout Out: the Arraborough series, by Eddie Drueding

I wanted to write a little mini-review of a series of books I've been reading as they've been coming out, by this fellow Eddie Drueding (here's his author page at Melange publishing; also, his personal website: http://animalstory.ca/), called Arraborough. The author has actually been sending me pre…

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I return

Okay, y'all. I'm back home now. Once I get over jetlag I'll try to get back in business and look at all these notices popping up in my inbox on this site, and modding and all that fun stuff. I'll open up commissions again, too. Ciao.

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Status update

So, obviously I've been quite scarce for some time now, so I figured I'd let folks know what I was up to (in case anyone cares). Here's what I've been up to during the past month or two: 1.) Researching, writing, and editing a paper about the Whirlpool Galaxy 2.) Writing and editing my thesis propo…

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Seeking opinions; Weasyl 'short story club'

So, FayV and I have been talking, and we both want to try to get something of a 'short story club' going on Weasyl. This would be like a book club, but for people like me and her who don't have the time to read a new novel every month. Hence substitute shorter works (short stories, novellas, plays)…

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Go see Guardians of the Galaxy. And something else.

That movie is GREAT. It's pretty much the perfect dumbass popcorn summer movie. And I didn't just like it because it heavily features a talking raccoon with a smart mouth and a love for firearms that are almost as big as he is, although that was definitely a major selling point for me (for obvious…

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About dark matter...

I wanted to bitch a little bit, to an audience of people who aren't at all colleagues of mine, in the sense that they aren't people in any way involved in my field of study. So, if you know anything at all about modern astronomy and/or astrophysics (to be clear, the former is the observational and…

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Status Update

Hey everyone. Just letting you all know, first off, that the reason I've been slow to upload new stuff (i.e. new entries about writing, since that's what I've been uploading lately) is because of a few things. One, I've been working hard to finish a paper at work (results from one part of the obser…

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If you are a writer, considering submitting to the FWG anthology

Just letting everyone know that the Furry Writers' Guild anthology is still taking submissions, until February 28th. Info can be found here: http://www.anthroaquatic.com/forum/index.php?topic=81.0 Theme is 'music'. Very broad. Please do consider submitting something for it. We are, quite simply, no…

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Commissions open again

After a rather long hiatus on these, I decided to open up art commissions again. Details on pricing and such are on my profile page here, and of course examples of my artwork can be found in the gallery. I'm limiting it to just one slot at a time because: a.) I don't expect to get much business b.)…

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Ah, you guys...

I see I've suddenly gained a number of new follows on this website, clearly in the wake of my tirade on FA. I'll say thank you, but I want to be clear that I don't intend to harbour any longterm ill-will against FA or any of its staff. And I realize that that sounds a bit like a 'MLR is trying to b…

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Story up on Anthro Dreams

Not that I have many watchers here, but I figured I'd cross-post this from FA. My old story "Curiosity and the Ringtailed Cat" is up on the Anthro Dreams Podcast now. They do a lot of good work there, so if you've never heard of them, go give some of their stuff a listen.