The beach is a nice lawnAn ocean’s beach has the constant ambiance of a seashell’s breath. For my son’s fifth birthday, or rather the weekend after, we’ve been marinating in a hundred and two year old seaside beach house designed by A. E. Doyle.
It’s a rare opportunity to enjoy the Oregon coast as a family with friends in the midst of the optimum season.
The location and birthday make it a once in a lifetime experience.
I’ve decided to enhance the presence of pets, particularly dogs, in the setting of my book Destiny’s Hand.
I got a dog at four.Her short name was Ipo, “Sweetheart” in Hawaiian.
Her full name meant “brave little sweetheart”; I don’t remember the Hawaiian.
She was my friend when I was alone in Fern Forest on an island with volcanic sunsets and a Green Sand Beach.
She wasn’t a pet. She was family.
A berry tastes better when U-Pick, though I’m not complaining about the sixty five pounds of ripe picked organic cherries for fifty seven dollars that we got on the fourth from Wolfe’s.
Continue reading My son’s weight in cherries. Summer is berry fun.
A tube of air, dirt, and water, of flora, fauna, and people, Ship Of Destiny’s habitat would spew very organic paste if squeezed hard enough.
Destiny’s Hand is a story based in a spaceship that will take fifty generations to arrive at its destination.
I’ve imagined that with a target population of only a thousand to maintain, life on the ship is something like life in a village or a very insular group within a city.
Varied experience with small political landscapes makes me comfortable writing fiction with related themes, especially passive aggressive power struggles.
Continue reading Political Experience Prepared The Generation Ship
My son, Yuri, is actually a good kid. We survive his shenanigans with little harm to home or body. But with him turning five, there is worry about how fast he is growing, both physically and in expressing independence.
Our children are a product of ourselves interacting with their environment. Whenever they say or do something bad, as a parents we should feel partially responsible.
Certainly my wife blames me for Yuri’s rude habits, as if I’m a big brother rather than a father. Children are sponges. Four days a week at a school/daycare, means he picks up actually quite a lot.
Continue reading Actually Daddy, I’m The Boss. Now Play With Me.
“Dialogue—Ouch, my OCD,” said editorSome dialogue from my draft:
“The peace makers have successfully vacuumed up the hummingbird.” The pleasant female voice pauses then continues. “And are requesting that it be expunged into space.”
Adjusted to:
“The peace makers have successfully vacuumed up the hummingbird,” says a pleasant female voice, “and are requesting that it be expunged into space.”
Barely six pages into my Destiny Hand’s doc before a friendly editor student had an aneurysm. Apparently I’ve developed, refined even, some bad grammar over the decades.
Continue reading “Need to work on my dialogue tags,” I groaned.
There comes a moment in a lucky man’s life when wife food surpasses mom meals. This happened for me around the time my wife started making the best sandwich bread I’ve ever had.
There is a vast food gap in my life between when I left home the day after I turned eighteen and when I started regularly eating wife food, or wife to be food, at twenty six.
Continue reading Wife food is good food-best sandwich bread in PDX
A man watches lines crisscross an angry dark like overlapping fireworks, while the hissing of escaping air is drowned out by nearby explosive decompression. A bright flash makes him push away with a pained gasp, and then the Rainbow Ships of the butterfly people suddenly swirl like a kaleidoscope viewed through the small porthole.
Before resting ten light seconds away, the Ship Of Destiny did a flyby just a few light seconds from Ortome. To launch their assault craft a couple days at craft speed from an asteroid around a quarter of Ortome’s mass. They approached from the far side, so the smaller potato would block line of sight, and blasted with dubam cannons when in range to create an actual cloud of debris. Just an innocent impact between two smaller neighboring potatoes.
I see value in both and do try to balance, but for Destiny’s Hand I lean towards realistic before entertaining. My hope is that this will ease consistency and ultimately be more immersive.
Continue reading Realistic Space Combat-does it tell a good story?
Since I found out I would have a son (Yuri), I’ve been considering what games would best give him an edge. I picked three initially that I enjoy and wish I’d learned as a child. Parenting is, after all, a vicarious life style.
I find it best to play with friends. Defeating strangers isn’t as savory.
Continue reading Games for my child, arming his mind with a fourth
I am most comfortable writing in third person, present tense.I’ve done a little first person present, but almost never past tense, third or first.
Sixteen years ago I got stuck in the intense immediate. I graduated college, and that summer to fill the mental void, I wrote Accursed Haven with a manic fervor I’ve never matched since.
It was wild. It was poetic. Here’s how it started:
A morbid man walks alone, looking for refuge in a city he has disowned. He sits down on a bench with a bottle in a brown bag.
