(Click to embiggen this picture. It’s huge.) We haven’t yet gotten around to decorating our house for Christmas. We were going to do that yesterday (as well as cooking a bunch of food to stock our freezer and so on), but Jennifer got sidelined by a 7-hour conference call for work, so we didn’t get any…
Year: 2015
A Death in November
So. Back in 2005, when National Novel Writing Month rolled around in November, I wrote Fred Again, a novel about a police detective and a young woman facing Lovecraftian forces beyond their control, and winning. Sort of. There was a lot going on in that novel. The title Fred Again didn’t come from me, though. It came…
Ways to Spend Money, Redux
Hm, I’m noticing that it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here to my blog. It’s nobody’s fault, in particular, I’ve just been busy. And when I haven’t been busy, I’ve been… well, busy. Busy busy busy. I took a class in advanced PHP/SQL and that took up a LOT of time. And now that the…
About that writing thing
This past weekend I participated in an online intensive short story workshop taught by Mary Robinette Kowal, who’s written some of my favorite stories (including “Lady Astronaut of Mars“, which is a beautiful story and you really ought to read if you haven’t already). It was amazingly educational — I took pages and pages of…
[A-Z] V is for Victory!
VICTORY! Sort of. So I went and wrote twenty-six blog entries, including this one, one for each letter of the alphabet. I did it out of order, and got scolded for that, but who says the alphabet has to be in alphabetical order? In library school I learned that order is what you make it….
[A-Z] E is for Episcopalian
Some of my earliest memories are of going to church at St. Jude’s Episcopal Church in Cupertino, California. It was a small church, as I recall, and I was a typical kid in a typical church: active, nerdy, investigatory. My mom let me bring toys, of course, and there were coloring activities in the church…
[A-Z] T is for Thumb
A brief entry for you tonight. Then two entries tomorrow. Then the [A-Z] blogging challenge will be over. At any rate, have you ever had a hangnail? The kind that turns your finger an ugly red color when you accidentally snag it on something, or slip when you cut it off with a pair a…
[A-Z] I is for Inconceivabilities
There are number of things I can’t really conceive of, and this, of course, presents a problem in my writing. The earliest piece of advice that most writers get is “Write what you know”, which is actually pretty silly. Most writers, especially writers of speculative fiction, don’t know everything about which they’re writing. In The Fifth Hand,…
[A-Z] J is for Jalapeño
Okay, I know these aren’t Jalapeño peppers. They’re Thai peppers, which are worse. And this story is about Thai food and Thai peppers and pain. For a few months I lived in a co-housing community in the eastern part of Davis, CA. This consisted of seven households with a common back yard and one house which…
[A-Z] Y is for Yaar!
So, every year there is the Northern California Pirate Festival over in Vallejo. I’ve never been, but I hear it’s good fun. You know, the usual: pillaging, looting, setting fire to things, general villainy, and good music. Actually, the main thing I hear is that it’s basically a good excuse to spend a day drinking….