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A few weeks ago The Economist wrote an article so ridiculous I'm still wondering if it's real: The news that Martin Amis had just spent $2.5 million on a brownstone in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood turned into a cream session over how Brooklyn was the new literary frontier.

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One of Stanislavski’s major contributions to acting theory was the concept not of “appearing” to be a character, but of “being” that character. In that regard, writing a short story or a novel may be even harder than acting, because in order to pull it off, you don't have to play just one role, you have to play all of them.

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At the time of this writing, it has been less than 24 hours since I watched the pilot episode of The Newsroom. Thanks to the miracle/atrocity that is the Internet, I was, of course, made painfully aware of the general reaction to the show well before I actually sat down and saw a frame of it.

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From honorable cyborgs to dastardly androids, Science Fiction is filled with synthetic beings of every sort. Robots give authors and readers a chance to contemplate deeper issues of self and consciousness - while still keeping rad options like laser cannons, super strength, and jet boots on the table.

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Books come out all the time, from major releases via The Big 6 to all those Kindle-only productions by authors that like to take things into their own hands. The industry is constantly buzzing about who just came out with what and how to get published. In this column though, we’re going to present the other side of the coin: what to do when you lose your publisher. Sometimes this can be rather unfortunate, but other times it’s a blessing in disguise. This is a personal tale in need of some set-up, so let’s begin at the beginning.