General

  1. Still not dead…

    I don’t even know when the last time is I logged on here, let alone posted content, reviewed others’ content, or acted like a member of this community. I’m still alive, still writing. In fact, I’ve started taking a class from David Gerrold, which is exciting. In case anyone’s interested, I’ve launched a new website with a series of shorts I’ve been working on, called Tales of the West. Stop on by if you care.
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  2. Musings on Fritz Leiber

    Here's a rather massive paragraph from the beginning of the book Witches of the Mind by Bruce Byfield, a critical assessment of the overall literary achievements of Fritz Leiber: "In Fritz Leiber and Eyes, the best effort to define an approach so far, Justin Leiber (Fritz's son) takes this diversity (of his influences) for granted. "Fritz simply likes to write a lot of different kinds of things," he explains. "And if half of them are ahead of their time or behind their time or so far out in...
  3. Everyday War

    Every day or so I have to fight against my own hatred. I was attacked and beaten at night in a park years ago, really, years, and years ago. I should be over it. Yet my hatred still remains. And I have violent thoughts of vengeance. I never reported the attack to the police, which was a major mistake. Not just for my own sake, but for the sake of others. So now here I am, deep in my own dark thoughts, where I do everything imaginable to the perpetrators. Such is vengeance. It is not...
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  4. My Relationship with Nature

    Discovering Mary Oliver has brought some changes. I've always liked the Transcendentalist poets, but find their poetry sometimes difficult, and I feel very removed from them, since they lived in an earlier era, and were all long-dead when I first walked the earth. But Mary Oliver is a modern Transcendentalist, and also a powerful link to the earlier ones. She helps me understand their writing, their ideas, and their lives, and better connects me to them in ways I wouldn't be otherwise. She...
  5. Man is like the grass that flourishes and is gone.

    I'm not much of a Biblical person, not because of animosity toward the Bible or the faith, but because of unfamiliarity. As a kid I only rarely attended Sunday school, and when I did I invariably got lost in any reference to a particular book of the Bible. Later I learned to understand and appreciate Christianity, but never really the Bible per se, especially the Old Testament. Anyway, the above words popped into my mind the other day, as I was rooting through long-sealed cardboard boxes...
  6. Visual Thinking

    I discovered Dr. Temple Grandin, who is an extremely visual thinker. She brings up some fascinating things in this video: I still haven't followed up on my earlier post about visual thinking, and I always intended to. This is getting me fired up about it again. I don't have the powerfully vivid imagery she seems to have, but I do get some visuals, and I can work with them in my mind, change them at will etc. I definitely do some of my thinking this way, probably especially when I'm drawing...
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  7. The Truth

    The difficulty with fiction is that it must be written as if it were true. This means the story must be believable when put up against what we already know. We create an imagined reality that must present as real. Some parts are easier to make real than others. Plot, check. Setting, check. For me, the hardest thing to make real are the characters. People are so darn complicated! Reality lies in consistency. I can’t have an ambitious Aries suddenly become a serene Taurus suddenly become an...
  8. The real meaning of magic

    I was plunged into this by a random statement made by Ian Crossland on the Tim Pool podcast. Ian is not the brightest bulb on the tree, and often says things that seem ridiculous to me, but this one took me up short and launched a new line of inquiry for me. He said something to the effect that Words were originally magic spells, that's why they're spelled Hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even somebody who says a lot of ridiculous things also spits a lot of truth. I know...
  9. Can writing be a meditation?

    This idea has been on my mind for a while, just as idle speculation, but now I want to run a bit of an experiment. I know drawing and painting function as active mediations for me, at least at times. It happens when you fall into the flow state, when time seems to stand still or you forget all about it, forget to eat a meal or two becuase you're so absorbed in the creative work, and when you do bring the session to an end you realize a lot more time has gone by than you thought, and you...
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  10. River Rocks

    I have a secret addiction. I cannot pass by a jumble of river rocks -- those small stones gathered together and sold for landscaping purposes -- without glancing down at them and, at the risk of seeming odd to any passerby, picking up one or two that momentarily pique my interest. And I've found some intriguing ones: a small agate (not of commercial value), some fossiliferous limestone (seashells and the like that have accumulated and become incorporated into stone), a piece of...
  11. Scrabble

    I love playing Scrabble. My husband and I played every day before he died. My brother comes over a few times a week and we always take out the board. I’m not really a competitive person but when it comes to Scrabble I like to win. Letters and words! Is there any better combination? My instinct for symbolism comes alive. Not even my brother’s constant harangue that I fucked the board bothers me. Getting that seven-letter word! Is there anything better? My most recent seven-letter word (a...
  12. Homeless Lite

    Back in the ol' hometown and I decided that rather than staying in and paying for a hotel -- and rather than accepting invites to crash at friend's houses or sleeping on mom's couch -- I'd take my tent and sleeping bag and camp in a city park. It's a nice tent and a nice park, though my little tent is dwarfed by rows of RVs. But the night was quiet and calm, no rain and no noise. But it's hard to make the compromise between hotel and home. The tent's too small to do anything other than...
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