When I started writing seriously back in 2011, I knew the last thing I needed was to start coming home every day from my corporate desk job and spend hours more behind a desk, so instead I learned my craft standing in the bedroom, typing on a little Acer Netbook perched high atop a tall chest of drawers. That worked well enough
A Quiet Place had a lot of buzz when it came out in 2018, but though I’m a huge fan of both Emily Blunt and John Krasinsky, for various reasons, I never saw it. So the other night, after a hiatus due to an injury, I was looking for scifi to watch while burning calories on my treadmill, and Netflix offered it up. But after five or ten minutes, I’d had enough. Here’s why.
One of the reasons I started my Patreon page was to defray the cost of certain items and services needed to advance my writing career so I can spend more time writing. The impetus for the change was a teleprompter I started tinkering together over the holidays.
Over the years, I’ve cobbled together all sorts of photographic gear, tools, gizmos, and software–but there is always a consideration of what in business school is called “the make or buy decision.” These days, when I start to build or repair or clean or fabricate, a proverbial birdie rests on my shoulder, singing “you should be writing, you should be writing.”
I write this moments after a massive explosion rocked the port of Beirut Lebanon, and before the wold can catch a breath and think what help might be appropriate, online conspiracy nuts are whispering “nuke.”
It was not a nuke. He’s how we know:
That depends on your definition of “touch.”
Obviously we can touch things. You are touching something right now that’s preventing you from falling to the center of Earth’s gravitational field. The thing is, “touching” may not mean what you think it does.
If you play pool, “touching” may conjure the firm crack of cue against ball, but if you’ve ever flown a kite, you know you can touch the air in a much squishier way.
I am reposting this here after it went viral on a website I contribute to. I cannot claim credit for this method; it stems from a parenting book by T. Berry Brazelton, but I can tell you it works–and what my parents did didn’t, though it veered at times into authoritarian abuse.
Here is what I did, from the time my children started on solid food:
I sent this letter to Mayor Sylvester Turner, of Houston:
Sir;
For what it’s worth, I have a suggestion relevant to the current state of unrest.
Since I started seriously writing, I’ve learned there are a vast assortment of skills I might logically profit by that I just don’t have. And I’m not talking about grammar and spelling, or judging when to use active voice or how to write dialog that sounds true to life but isn’t as dull and repetitive as life—though those are all on the list.
No, I’m talking about the meta-skills, the things writers need to know these days that have nothing (or little) directly to do with writing, skills like using software to create promotional signage and book layouts, reading stories before an audience (or into a microphone for audiobooks), hawking your wares from a comic con booth or yes….begging for money.
That last might seem an odd choice for someone like me with major contest wins and a string of top market professional sales under my belt. But the sad truth is, short stories just don’t pay very much, and unless you hide all the other writers in a cupboard somewhere, it’s almost impossible to sell more than a few per year at professional rates.
So…as I work on the core skills (the prosy ones and the butt in chair, actually writing the novel ones) I started thinking a few years back, that it would be wise if I had a plan in place, should the need arise, to convince the IRS that yes, this writing thing really is a business that will one day turn a net profit after appearances and expenses.
My first step along those lines was to create Got Scifi Group, a small imprint and informal collaborative of some of my award-winning writer friends, for the purpose of producing anthologies that those of us who make appearances and don’t yet have a back list of novels can sell at a measurable profit.
In this, the first week of May, 2020, many are arguing for the reopening of the US economy, often arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic just isn’t bad as the media makes out. Let’s look at that claim.
It is true that in 2020 thus far, with social distancing (such as it is), the US has seen “only” 75,000+ COVID-10 deaths compared to nearly 400,000 heart disease & cancer deaths in a typical year during the same period. But there is a vital difference that makes these numbers incomparable: we are not developing 200,000 new cases of cancer & heart disease every WEEK (as we are currently with COVID-19) and cancer and heart disease are not contagious and cannot double in number every few days as COVID-19 can.
Today, Texas is living in denial. In a month, its people will be paying the price.
Back in March, when Harris County unexpectedly cancelled the Houston Livestock & Rodeo, residents were taking things seriously. SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 has a slow incubation time, but the numbers don’t lie when you plot them. Slowly, new confirmation rates started growing at a slowing rate as the virus burned through the supply of infected but not yet ill people. Then, by the first week of April, the growth of new cases flattened, then actually started to drop.
