Twitterspawn for 2009-03-31

Much as I like Stephen Colbert, I really hope NASA goes with “Serenity”. # Perhaps if I had stayed home today then our database wouldn’t have broken? # Bad: Finding out that some idiot has messed up your mission critical code. Worse: Finding out that the idiot was you. # Enjoying the comments on this [...]

Twitterspawn for 2009-03-30

I resent my body for requiring sleep. I could get so much more writing done in those lost six to seven hours. # Feck off, cup! # Four motorcycle cops, three cop cars, and a guy face down on the ground in front of our building this morning. Happy Monday! # Story of the Week [...]

Story of the Week #36: Pet Ghosts

This is another cheat. I originally wrote “Pet Ghosts” because a few years ago I heard a story on NPR about people whose pets have died, and who report seeing the ghosts of their pets. I didn’t pay much attention to the story, but I did note the title: “Pet Ghosts”. And my brain interpreted it in an entirely different way. I cleaned it up and rearranged some pieces and put it out to you. There are a couple of in jokes that I hope you can spot and appreciate.

On another note, I’ve decided to start posting these stories first thing on Monday mornings instead of 12:01 a.m. Sundays. The idea here is that people will have a better opportunity to read the story if they find it in their feeds at the very beginning of the work week.

Anyway. Enjoy!

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Twitterspawn for 2009-03-29

Another rejection for “Padma”, but one that came with honest and severe critique. Great ideas for improving the story. # At Borders, working on a story about a rogue shithouse. # Finished critiquing one novel, with two weeks to spare. Now on to the next one! # Watching “From Beyond”. # “Nothing says party like [...]

Publication Alert!

Issue #10 of Shimmer, which includes my short story, “The Bride Price”, is now available. Because it’s the tenth issue, the publishers are celebrating by making the electronic version available for free on their website. Woo hoo! More exposure for my story! (And, I suppose, the other ones as well.) Download the electronic version here. [...]

Twitterspawn for 2009-03-28

Note: the Thai Ginger Bistro in downtown Petaluma has the best summer rolls on the planet. # Off to lunch and Les Mis with the fam in San Jose. # Unexpected resistance on I-680 S may delay our triumphant arrival into San Jose. # Apparently everyone in Stockton is moving to Pleasanton today. # At [...]

Twitterspawn for 2009-03-27

Oooh! Killer doppelgangers in this movie! # Drinking Zin and watching a really awful horror movie. # Slept in on my day off. Bleary eyed but up and drinking coffee now. # How to spot a Twitter user with an “enhanced” follower count: http://bit.ly/9KbsI # Going to see Christopher Moore (who ought to get himself [...]

Story of the Week #35: A Philosophical Discourse

Um. Yeah. So this is what happens when you realize you only have two and half hours to write a story and the one you’ve been working on all week has been a bust so far and isn’t going anywhere at all. You draw on your old college days and pull something entirely different out of thin air. In my case, what I studied in college was philosophy.

In this little epic, I’ve tried to write dialog that was true to each character’s philosophy and rhetoric. Perhaps I succeeded. Perhaps I failed. It all depends, as Socrates might have said, on exactly what you yourself mean by those terms.

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BSG – No Spoilers

A few quibbles here and there, but on the whole, I was very pleased with the ending of Battlestar Galactica. A few questions were not answered to my perfect satisfaction, but then I’m kind of dense sometimes anyway, so maybe I just missed the answers. It was far more closure than I was expecting. And [...]

NaNoCruft

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this term. I like to think that I am, though, so I’m going to claim that I am. “NaNoCruft”. It’s the term I use to refer to the bits of prose that you used to fatten up your word count when writing your National [...]

Story of the Week #34: ESTJ

This one is inspired by a prompt given to me by my good friend . Though I didn’t quite use the prompt as he gave it, it was certainly fun to write. I enjoyed getting inside the head of one of the secondary characters from my work in progress. The end is giving me some trouble, so if anyone has any suggestions on what I could do with the ending, I’d greatly appreciate it.

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Story of the Week #33: The Revisioned

This one started when, a few months ago, I started thinking about toys and toymakers. A long time ago, more than a century, toys used to be something that anyone could build and amuse a child with. Well, anyone who could carve wood and do a little painting, at least. Now you have to be a software engineer and materials specialist with advanced degrees in physics to create the toys that line the shelves of Kay-Bees or Toys ‘R’ Us. Heck, even cars used to be built in a way that let any teenager with a bunch of tools and a spare weekend rebuild their carburetor. Now you need an advanced degree just to work on your car, and you can’t just take it to your local garage if what it needs is a software reboot. Even our vacuum cleaner started acting weird a few months ago because it needed to have its software upgraded.

Now, I don’t have anything against technology. I’m a web developer, after all, and my media player packs over a hundred albums and about a dozen movies on a device not much larger than a credit card. I love living in the future, and I don’t think that, short of a civilization-destroying calamity or a global “back to simpler times” movement enforced with violent weaponry, we will ever get back to a society where a guy could pick up a block of wood and a carving knife and create a line of toys that would amuse a crowd of children

So I got to thinking: what would it take to have a world where building sophisticated toys, complete with moving parts and low-level artificial intelligence, could be made by anyone who wanted to, without having to have advanced degrees or purchase expensive tools and components. I suppose you could have a magic system like that, but I didn’t want a magic system; I wanted something that work more like the technology that we understand, or that at least we could conceive of.

Every novel or story is, as one writer whose name eludes me put it, the wreck of a beautiful idea. This is the wreck that emerged from the idea I just described above.

“The Revisioned” is the longest and the most ambitious of the stories I’ve written for my “Story of the Week” project. It’s also a very different tone, I think, from what I usually write; it’s not comedic, it’s not goofy. It deals with some dark themes — or at least with some dim themes — and there’s not a zombie to be found. It’s also the first one I showed to some friends of mine for criticism before posting it here. Its length, at close to eight thousand words, may turn some of my readers off, but I hope you will enjoy it.

If you have any comments or criticims or compliments, I would really appreciate them.

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Current Mood:  accomplished

Doommonger of the Week #1: Igor Panarin

This post begins what I hope will be a more or less regular series in my blog, the “Doommonger of the Week”. Each week (more or less), I’ll be highlighting some scholar, public figure, or non-public figure, who has predicted that some sort of doom or disaster will fall upon the United States or the [...]

Daleks everywhere

Another thing I’ve never made a secret of is my fondness for the British science fiction show Doctor Who. It’s a cheesy show, filled with great villains and monsters and aliens; and the Doctor himself is just so much fun (especially as portrayed by David Tennant). One of my favorite villainous races in Doctor Who [...]

Christopher Moore showing up near me

Chrisopher Moore is the author of Lamb, Fluke, Bloodsucking Fiends, A Dirty Job, and many other brilliant works. He has also been one of the most prominent influences on my own writing, though I ask that you not hold that against him. And, according to his website, he will be appearing at Copperfield’s Books in [...]