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Latest Post
“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”
Not that people ask me this much, but they might someday, if I ever manage to submit something publishable to the right editor. And I’ve got a story I’m revising that’s kicking my arse right now, so any excuse to not work on that is deeply welcome. At least here I’m still quote-unquote writing.
So where do my ideas come from? A few have obvious inspirations (I have a draft of a story detailing the thoughts of a man falling to his death after reading a story in which some nameless red-shirt fell to his death, for instance). For the most part they just seem to pop into my head from out of nowhere, usually at really inconvenient times and only very occasionally when I’m actually at the keyboard writering away at something. There are some people (Steven Pressfield, for instance) who believe such inspiration to be divine, a whisper from eternity. Others, like Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, place its source in their own subconscious, in an entity they name the Silent Partner and Fred, respectively, an entity who can be communicated with, but never spoken to, as such, and who can be trained, or at least encouraged, to focus and produce.
Myself I likely fall more into the latter camp, though I’m open to the notions of the former, as well. I see mine as Continue reading
Featured Posts
“Message to the GOP: stop making women angry. You won’t like us when we’re angry.”
So said friend and fellow Clarionite Kali Wallace when I posted this picture on my facebook page, and I couldn’t agree more.
You don’t hear people talking about it much these days, but in the run-up to the 2010 election, in which the GOP took over the House of Representatives, the campaign was jobs, jobs, jobs. But as soon as they were sworn in, the Tea Party insurgents and the remainder of the Republican establishment decided that they would be best served if the economy didn’t recover, and they turned their legislative efforts back to the Culture War, with a deeply misguided emphasis on women’s health and reproductive rights.
I think it’s fair to say that that decision came back to bite them squarely on the ass, as well it should have. Continue reading
I´ll start by saying that I never have been much good at being happy. Oh, I´ve had my moments, even periods of weeks and months when I was genuinely, truly happy, when the stars were aligned and things were going well and I recognized it and was grateful.
But those times never lasted, and when the light went away, the darkness welled up from its hidey-hole, and there I was again. I´ve tried to fill that hole with all kinds of things: sex, drugs, alcohol, food, friends, travel, books, jokes, you name it. None of it ever works for long. Continue reading
So, I want to tell a sort of funny story (as with most funny stories, it wasn’t funny at the time, but is hilarious in retrospect) from my travels by way of making a larger point about life, politics, and the way things hardly ever work out in the best possible way.
As many of you probably already know, I am currently traveling in South America, and I brought my father, who underwrote many an adventure I took as a younger, broker man, along for the first week or so to wander Peru and see Macchu Pichu. That part of the plan went swimmingly, and though we had to curb our ambitions somewhat so as to not overdo things, we had a wonderful time that we’ll both treasure for the rest of our lives.
Then, at the end, things got a bit squirrely. Continue reading
Fictions
- Bamboo (flash fiction) "Good luck," Cassie said, as she handed it to him and smiled. (more…)
- Grief Counseling (flash fiction) "Waaaaaaaaaahhhhh..!" Josie cried. "Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh..!" (more…)
- Old Man Bradley's Ghost (flash fiction) Some people swore that the house was haunted. It sat apart from the other houses in the neighborhood, decaying slowly as we grew older. (more…)
- Emergence (flash fiction) Out of death must come life. A new cycle must be begun. (more…)
