Roger Floyd's Website

As an unpublished writer, I’ve been (quite obviously) looking forward to seeing my writing in print, whether it’s just a story in a magazine or a full novel on the shelves of bookstores everywhere.  Toward that end, I’ve read magazines and attended meetings where agents and publishers and others in the publishing world give all sorts of advice on how…

Well, the new year is here.  Now what? I’m not one to make many new year’s resolutions and this year I haven’t made any of what could be called a real resolution.  Exercise more, write more, read more, learn more about the writing life–these are all ideas that pop into my head at various and random times during…

I’ve been struck over the years I’ve been working with the English language, with phrases of (usually) two words which together produce an unusual “click” or sound in my mind that isn’t simply the result of the sum of the individual meanings of the words.  A few are below, and perhaps you, as the reader of this…

As an aspiring writer, I’m always plagued by the fear that I won’t be able to come up with another idea for a story.  That applies to either a short story or a novel, though right now I have enough ideas for novels to last me for a couple of years.  I’m trying to finish my…

Have you ever heard of Walt Kelly?  He’s the artist/writer who gave us the comic strip “Pogo” back in the 1950’s through the ’70’s.  I’ve been a fan of his ever since my father bought a copy of Kelly’s book, “The Pogo Papers” (1953) in 1954.  The book was a compilation of earlier Pogo comic strips and…

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, mostly for a course in science fiction I’m taking, and I’ve become more and more aware of a very common grammatical construction that virtually all writers (including me) use.  And use almost to distraction.  I’m talking about two particular phrases, each of which comes in several forms: “there is” or…

Do you have a hobby? As a writer, I spend most of my writing time with my butt in a chair in front of a computer–like now–tapping black keys to make letters and numbers appear on a white screen.  I do some writing on a yellow pad of paper too, but that’s usually a much smaller part of…

Life just got lonelier in our Galaxy. According to a new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (yes, I know, nobody reads that) the chances of complex alien life developing on other planets in our galaxy just got more unlikely.  It appears that an asteroid belt like the one we have in…

I read a poll of Russians taken approximately a year ago that said one-third of Russians believe the sun revolves around the Earth.  Now, it’s difficult to draw any substantial conclusions from that poll for several reasons, not the least of which is that many of them may have been–cliché alert–trying to pull the leg of the…

I’ve been reading a book lately called “The Case for Mars,” by Robert Zubrin.  In it he lays out in considerable detail his plan to mount a manned expedition to Mars that would go directly from Earth to Mars without stopping anywhere along the way.  His plan, which apparently has been adopted at least provisionally…

When I first began writing (serious writing that is, for entertainment, not for scientific purposes or to hand in to a teacher) I heard that a serious, competent writer had to read other writers and authors in order to advance his own work.  On the face of it, that’s a good idea: learn from the experts,…

I read an article on Yahoo News this past week about an increase in the number of fraudulent scientific papers published over the past thirty years.  The article was written by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, and he says that since the mid-1970s, the number of retractions of scientific papers for outright fraud has jumped from…