A desperate bid to rediscover creativity
At this stage, ideas for stories, characters, and settings are still rare and precious things that flit through the cave of my mind and are gone if I don’t catch them immediately. At this point though, most of the ideas I’ll probably catch (to stick with the analogy) are probably not the highest quality. What… Continue reading A dearth of ideas
It's Easter morning and while I had our new dog out for a walk at the crack of dawn, we spotted a rabbit. He, of course, pulled and pulled wanting nothing other than to go after it. The timing of seeing a rabbit on Easter morning gave me the inspiration for a story, so after our… Continue reading Oscar and the Easter Bunny
Back in the fall of 2016, I decided that I was out of shape. I hadn’t ever been much of an athlete, but I had the urge to get in shape. I took a wind trainer, a device to which you attach any road bike that turns it into a stationary bike, and set it… Continue reading Feel the burn
So if my last post sounded self-pitying, I should qualify it by saying that this past winter I sold a short story to a forthcoming anthology. Go me! it's due out later this year in December and is set in Julie Czerneda's excellent Trade Pact universe. I'm really looking forward to seeing it in print.… Continue reading Not all is lost
I'm on a quest this spring to regain my creativity. At some point in the past few years, I feel I abandoned it along the side of life's road. It's probably there, looking forlorn and possibly shivering. At least I hope it hasn't wandered off to die in the wilderness. That would be horrible. It… Continue reading Starting all over again
Waking up to Donald Trump's victory elicited a combination of anger, sadness and disappointment. Hate and fear and division won the day. Fifty years after its advent, the bright, inclusive future that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek promised seems more distant in the aftermath of yesterday's election. It's also more imperative a goal now than before.
Over the winter, I played a succession of three video games that involved characters in a parenting or protective role: Fallout 4; The Last of Us; and The Walking Dead. And if parenting in today's world is hard, it's even worse once the world goes to hell. Today I'm writing about my parenting experience with… Continue reading Parenting in the Post Apocalypse: The Walking Dead
Defiant, by Karina Sumner-Smith, is the follow-up novel to her debut, Radiant, and the middle chapter of her Towers Trilogy. Picking up two months after the conclusion of Radiant, the book continues the story of Xhea, a girl with no place in a world running on magic, her friend, Shai, the ghost of a girl from… Continue reading Defiant, by Karina Sumner-Smith – book review
This looks pretty good. Hadn't heard much about it before now.
Moleskine, makers of some of the most popular paper notebooks in the world, have teamed up with the creators of the Neo Smartpen to make it a lot easier to digitize your hand-written notes and sketches, to move them onto your mobile device, and to share them. Source: Moleskine's Smartpen Digitizes Your Notebooks as You're… Continue reading Moleskine’s Smartpen Digitizes Your Notebooks as You’re Writing In Them
Dispatches from Obscurity 