the Author

Monthly Archives: August 2020

Posted in ebooks, Short Stories, Conventions.

Before I talk a bit about the short story, I have conven­tion news! Conflu­ence, a Pitts­burgh conven­tion, has decided to go on-line this year, shifting its name to C’mon­flu­ence. I have not done an on-line conven­tion yet, but I’ll be one of the on-line guests. I don’t have a lot of infor­ma­tion about what, exactly, I’ll be partic­i­pating in yet, but it’s free to register/join. Today’s short story — on Monday, even — is Flight. It’s the second dinosaur story (there has been no third, and it’s not connected to the first one). The only thing I remem­bered about this one – before format­ting and proofing – was the use of two names, tuck­er­iza­tions of two real life people I knew from GEnie. I didn’t remember the actual plot, just flashes of scenes; I also didn’t remember how I ended it >.<. The … Continue reading 

Posted in Uncategorized.

This post has evolved out of a number of different conver­sa­tions I’ve had in real life, and one in partic­ular with a person I other­wise respect and have known since I was six years old. He has become very entrenched in an almost liber­tarian view of the world, and I wanted to contex­tu­alize the reasons I held my own views in a way that de-esca­lated his sense that “all liberals just want to take my money”. It wasn’t an argu­ment; I cannot speak for him, and I cannot speak for other people, but I can explain my own thoughts and reasons for my choices. (He expected that I would hold his beliefs — and I get this a lot, for reasons that are entirely and completely unclear to me.) In the end, he could under­stand my … Continue reading 

Posted in writing.

The first thing I want to say is: I love Michelle Obama. After her speech, when Eva Longoria said, “This is what we missed”, she spoke for me. Over the past four years a lot of people have asked me, when others are going so low does going high still really work? My answer… Going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehu­man­izing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out every­thing else. She goes on to say that going high doesn’t mean that we smile and make nice when we see injus­tice, when we see wrong, because going high doesn’t mean closing our eyes. The reason Michelle … Continue reading 

Posted in Books, Cast, download, Short Stories.

Well. Today, Word­Press upgraded to 5.5. This… broke things, for the first time since 2.x, on my site. Much of the morning, in which I intended to upload the latest short story (after format­ting, proofing, etc.) was stalled by the fact that the backend of my site wasn’t really working. (Jeremy Tolbert rescued me: he told me exactly what was broken – a plug-in. It’s upgraded and working now). And then, to top it all off, when uploading the story to kindle, I uploaded the wrong story. I noticed this when uploading to Kobo, because the cover… was the last story’s cover T_T. I have not, however, thrown my computer out the window. Barely. This short story was published in 1997, so written in 1996. It’s inter­esting … Continue reading