Hi!

Those of you who have known me long enough know that back in the early 2000s I went to library school for a few semesters before freaking out about an assignment in “Collection Management” and dropping out. That’s been one of my biggest regrets — that, and the fact that I gave up on the chance to work with James Burke (of Connections fame) on his big new web project.

So, I’ve decided to go back. I’m back in the Master of Library and Information Sciences program at San José State University. It’s an entirely online program, so the various shelter-in-place orders issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t affecting it. A few changes have been made in the syllabus of the Information Professions class I’m taking, but that’s about it. The professor of that class is very kind and understanding, too, which is certainly a bonus.

My only concern about going back to library school is that I’m 52 years old, and maybe I’m a bit too old to consider a big career change. I’m a wee bit tired of programming and making websites, but I do like working with information and with people… but if I’m 54 or 55 when I get my degree, will it really be worth it? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Library school has always appealed to me, since I like pretending that I’m all scholarly and what-not, but I don’t like focusing on just one subject. I could never get a Master’s degree (or, God forbid, a PhD.) in one minuscule aspect of a single field. With an MLIS degree, I can still apply my brain to a whole bunch of different areas of knowledge. I just hope I don’t freak out again.

Meanwhile, work is work. I’m extremely privileged in that I work for an organization that allows for 100% telework, and my wife does as well. Many others in this pandemic situation are not as fortunate. We try to shop local when we can, tip drivers well, and thank “essential workers” profusely and contribute to the local food bank.

Speaking of books, try not to buy books from Amazon.com if you can avoid it, unless there is absolutely no other source or you need to read it on your Kindle (which, I know, many people do for accessibility reasons). Indibound does a fantastic job of hooking people up with local independent bookstores, searching their databases for books you plug in to their search engine and guiding you to a local shop which will ship the book to you. You may pay a bit more, but you’ll keep a local shop in business, and the people who work there. Do it.

I’m going to close this blog post by plugging a few things of my own. First, Daikaijuzine is back and online. One of the things I had regretted doing was letting that site go and die. Well, it’s back. The releases have been irregular due to various reasons, but as we find our footing, we’ll get back to a regular reading and release schedule.

Second, I’ve put some more short stories online for your amusement:

1. “Burying Uncle Albert” is one of my favorites, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
2. “How the Old Ones Saved Christmas” is full of holiday magic, and who couldn’t use a little of that during the pandemic?
3. Finally, “How Bubba Handy’s Rogue Shithouse Saved the World” was a blast to write a few years ago, and I still think it’s a fun read.

These are all up on my Writing page, which you can find by clicking the link in the top menu of my site.

Finally, I’m plugging for someone who isn’t me. The Bone Shard Daughter is the debut novel by Andrea Stewart, who is both a fantastic writer and a good friend. I was a member of a critique group with her for a number of years, and I know just how good a writer she is. You can read an excerpt on io9.

And that’s all I have for now. Hopefully I’ll be writing in my blog more often as this pandemic grinds on. I have Thoughts about the pandemic, but they border on the political, and thus are not appropriate for this particular blog entry.

Stay safe and healthy, my friends.

I keep forgetting that I have one of these things out in the world. So, a quick miscellany.

First, I want to point out the the first issue of the rebooted Daikaijuzine is out, featuring some fantastic fiction and poetry. Go over and check it out.

Second, I’m going back to library school! People who’ve known me since before, oh, 2004, know that I originally enrolled in San Jose State University’s MLIS program back in 2003. I let my enrollment lapse a couple of years later because, if I’m being honest, I was intimidated by one of the classes I was taking. Since then, I’ve regretted not completing the program (especially since I’d just volunteered to work on a website with JAMES FREAKING BURKE, he of the Connections TV series fame from a few years back). A few years back I checked in and discovered that since it’d been over seven years since I’d dropped out, all of my grades had been wiped out and I’d essentially have to start over. I shrugged then, but this time around I decided to give it another serious go. So, here I go. Since the last time I was in the program it’s gone entirely online, which should be interesting. Classes start in spring 2020.

Third, the writing progresses aplenty. I’ve begun outlining A Plague of Ghosts (working title), my Big Project which is both a World War One epic and a space opera. I’m not yet sure how I’m going to get both of these things working together but I will. I’m really looking forward to writing this one, even if I am intimidated by it. Draft one will be started in November, as my NaNoWriMo project. (Remember NaNoWriMo? Yeah, I sort of passed on it these past two years, but I’m raring to go again.) I’ve been reading plenty of WWI history, and plenty of space opera to get myself into the mood.

The other writing news is that… Well, nothing. I have yet to make a professional sale, which I’ve been aiming for for some years now. I have been sending out submissions, of course, but getting no bites. Ah well. These are all stories that I feel are in a complete stage. I have several others that I am still working on: “Sauromancy”, “Anamet”, and “Sparrow Court” are among them.

Oh, I’ve also gotten solid feedback on two novels that I have written, Padma and The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster. These I will polish up in my copious spare time and then move on to the next stage of novel-hood, whatever that may be.

Fourth, a health update: For the past couple of years I’ve noticed a strange twinge in the top of my left foot that happened every once in awhile. I finally went to a podiatrist who said she thought it was an impingement, possibly caused or exacerbated by my flat feet. She gave me some special insoles for my shoes, and when they didn’t help she gave me a boot to wear. I wore the boot for three weeks or so, and while it helped a bit, it didn’t stop the pain entirely. The podiatrist pronounced herself baffled and decided to order an MRI. So that’s coming up. For now I get to wear the boot “for the foreseeable future”. No walking or running or any sort of high-impact exercise. Which means I will be moving the recumbent stationary bicycle into the guest room so that I can use it without bugging Jennifer.

Oh, I also sprained my right ankle. That was about a month ago. It still hurts. The same podiatrist said it would hurt for 2-3 weeks, then feel “weird” for a couple of months after that. I guess it doesn’t hurt so much as it does “feel weird”. Color me annoyed. I’ve been limping on both sides for some time now.

Um, I think that’s it.

Hopefully it will be more than five or so months before I get around to updating again. October is almost here — it’s my favorite time of year — so I hope to have some spooky content up here soon.

Until then, be well my friends.

These days, it seems like it’s fashionable to simply not make New Year’s resolutions. Why, just today one of my Facebook friends declared that 2010 was so awesome that she wasn’t going to make any resolutions for 2011, just try to top 2010. To which I say, Bah. I was not making resolutions before not making resolutions was cool.

For awhile I avoided making New Year’s resolutions just because I thought January 1 was a very arbitrary date to make a significant change in your life. I figured any date would do, so I chose March 25 as my “resolution” date. Then I decided that resolutions in general were kind of silly. Why should one choose to change a single behavior or habit when what everyone really needed was a complete personality overhaul (I was pretty cynical when I was in college). Finally I just decided to give up on resolutions, New Year’s or otherwise, and just sort of go on with my life.

Then a couple of years ago I decided that what I would do is take the new year as an opportunity to revisit my personal priorities and set some goals. I guess that’s the same thing as a resolution, though, isn’t it?

At any rate, here are the priorities I’m setting for 2011. They’re not listed in any sort of priority, so each of these priorities has more or less equal… uh, priority. And I’m putting them online so that you all can help me stay honest.

Health: I’ve tried — oh, how I’ve tried — to make my physical health a priority over the years. Making my health a priority means not just exercising (taking advantage of the gym membership that Jennifer and I purchased back in October) and eating right, but also sleeping regular hours and, heck, even brushing my teeth and flossing regularly. So let’s see if 2011 is the year when I take my health seriously.

Writing: I do take my writing pretty seriously, but this year I want to take my commitment to the next level. “But what in the world does that mean?” I hear you cry. It means making a concerted effort to market myself as a writer in ways that I haven’t done so in the past (and this will actually mean doing some research first to figure out how to do this), and to simply making more time to actually write. Also, keeping five active submissions going at all times. Yeah, that last one’s going to have to start in February, after I get some manuscripts ready to go. Also, I want to make this blog a higher priority.

Faith: I won’t talk about this one too much, simply because it’s very personal to me. Suffice to say, I plan on going to church more often. And on volunteering with some local charities.

Relationships: …by which I mean my relationships with various people in my life: family, friends, co-workers, and so on. I have this horrible tendency to let my friends drop off the radar when they’re not in my immediate vicinity for too long. Thus, I have friends in different parts of the country that I haven’t kept in touch with, and that I haven’t even talked to for months. Facebook has helped with this, but it’s certainly no replacement for phone calls or even just plain old fashioned email. Same with family, which is a shame. So I want to make maintaining my relationships (and building new ones) a priority for this coming year.

Work: Not much needs to be said about this, and I don’t think I need to work on this one very much. I have a good, secure job that I enjoy. Basically I don’t need to increase my focus on this priority, but I can’t really let it slip either.

Geekery: Isn’t that a great word? But what do I mean by saying that I want to focus on “Geekery” as a priority for the coming year? At first I thought this meant just being more of a nerd, and engaging in nerd culture. I mean, if someone can resolve to engage in their own national or ethnic culture over the coming year, then why couldn’t I focus on the culture I belong to? But then I thought about it some more and decided that what this really means is ongoing learning and engaging. I plan on learning new programming languages, learning more about history, engaging in more local cultural events, and so on. Geekery — in my mind, at least — means getting involved with the world around you and ongoing learning. Oh, and spending more time interacting with fellow geeks.

And in addition to these priorities, I have a couple of core values that I plan on working in to my life: namely, integrity and creativity. So, as I approach each priority, I plan on doing so with those values in mind.

What’s really fun is that I can find ways of working on goals that meet more than one of these priorities. For example, my goal of writing a web-based Manuscript Submission Tracking tool in Python for myself falls under both Writing and Geekery, while a goal of exercising more with my friends is both a Health goal and a Relationships goal. And a goal to get involved with, say, the social committee at work is both a Work goal and a Relationships goal. Pretty snazzy, right?

Now that I’ve got all that written down, it seems like a lot. But I don’t think it really is. Most of these priorities are repeats from last year, and it’s easy to keep them in mind anyway. The big part for me comes when I review my priorities and set goals on a regular basis. I’ve already set a few — weight loss, software to write, manuscripts to revise and finish, and so on.

Anyway. Thanks for reading this far, those of you who did. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I’m wide open to hearing them.

Jennifer and I have been planning on renovating our home office ever since we moved into this house three years ago. When we first moved in, we had a cheesy setup involving an extra dining room table, two laptops, and a couple of bookcases. We eventually bought a couple of cheap desks through Craigslist, desks which had originally been part of a church youth group center or something and which they sold to us for $75 each or so. Those, along with the bookcases we’d both been holding on to since the 90s, contributed to a decorating scheme that we called “Late Twentieth Century College Student Eclectic”. To give you an idea of what this looked like, here is a picture of Jennifer’s side of the office prior to the remodeling:

…and here’s a picture of my side of the office:

To our credit, each workstation was… functional. Jennifer’s overflowed with knitting books and various papers, while mine was covered with books, manuscripts in various stages of revision, and toys. And, of course, our computers were prominent on each.

This year for Christmas we decided that our gift to each other would be a remodeling of our office, to make it functional and — dare we imagine it — attractive. So the weekend before Christmas we went to Ikea and purchase seven large boxes worth of office furniture. The cats found them fascinating:

The whole time we were working on this I had Jonathan Coulton’s song “Ikea” playing in my head.

Anyway, assembling furniture is fun! Isn’t it? Sure it is. And after much pounding, drilling, and swearing, our new workstations were finished. The old desks we put up on Freecycle, and we made sure they went to good homes.

So here is Jennifer’s new workstation:

See? It’s all purdy. The desk closes up completely so the casual observer can’t tell, just by looking, that we are both terminally disorganized.

And here’s my side of the office:

Complete with a cat that shoots green laser beams from its eyes!

The bookshelf is cool because the bottom is a file drawer that rolls out to reveal the manuscripts that I have been working on (the file drawer also makes a swell lurking place for the cats). On top of the desk you can see the knitted Dalek that Jennifer made for me for my birthday a couple of years ago. And on the wall next to my bookcase you can seem the zombie-themed calendar that Jennifer got me for my birthday this year. (Every year I get a few more zombie-related gifts for my birthday… Can’t imagine why.)

At any rate, you have now seen where I sit and write… or, at least, where I sit and procrastinate. Exciting, isn’t it?

It seems that every single geek oriented podcast I listen to as well as every single geek oriented blog I read is all a-twitter over Dragon*Con.  For days my Twitter feed has been full of people posting messages about how they’re packing for Dragon*Con, setting up book signings for Dragon*Con, arranging panels for Dragon*Con, or just planning on all the parties they’re going to go to at Dragon*Con.  It’s like they’re rubbing my face in the fact that the housing market in Sacramento tanked approximately three hours after we bought our new house, and now no one wants to buy our old one, so we can’t afford to go this year.  And this year’s chock-full of great guests, including Feedback and Major Victory!  Dammit.  Stupid economy and its burst bubbles.

Well, to all those who are going, I hope you have a splendid time, and that you die in a fire.

(Oh, and 2,035 words added to The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster over the past three days.  Over 50% of them were original to this draft, too!)