If it wasn’t for readers, writing would be a lot easier.
Year Nine
In my forty-odd years of employment, I kept a list of things I wanted to do, but for reasons of expense or time, I had to put off. “Fly an airplane” was one of them. “Write a novel” was another. When I retired at the beginning of 2015, I reviewed the list. Some things were […]
Chopstick Dexterity
If the Dems had their way, they would be the only party. They’d tell you who the candidates are and you’d be allowed to vote for (only) them. That’s how it works in China. The CCP (Communist Chinese Party) chooses the candidates in local elections, and then “the people” get to vote for (only) them. […]
Censorship
In China, I discovered how their government let’s you hear only the news they want you to hear. In America, if you’ve haven’t heard about Elon Musk’s Twitter revelations, the reason is the same.
Computers Lie and Cheat
In the 70s, we had a Scrabble game where I worked, probably on an IBM 360 mainframe running VM1 or similar. The program may have come from what is called netnews, a very early and nerdy-type of what is now called social media. The computer’s play was excellent and rarely beatable, so much so that […]
The Antagonist’s Plan
Stories are usually focused on one character called the protagonist. Readers see through their eyes, experience their emotions, and thereby escape their problems for a little while. Such is the attraction of good fiction. For the majority of these stories, that person–the protagonist–is, in fact, a puppet. He or she is yanked this way or […]
Two Kinds of Writers
I see two kinds of writers at the writing groups I attend. First and most common are the ones doing personal therapy. (Please note: I don’t intend any disrespect; I’ve been there and done that myself.) The goals of these writers include the revelation of daemons, learning where they came from and how to temper […]
Telling A Lie
Words mean things, specific things. A “lie” is when someone knows otherwise but chooses to intentionally deceive others. That’s not the same as believing or hoping something and saying so. That’s not telling a lie. And when those beliefs are challenged but the person sticks to their guns, that also is not telling a lie. […]
Cooking Up Plutonium-238
Somewhere between 1995 and 2000, I was sent to teach a pSOS+ class to Westinghouse engineers in Savannah, Georgia. At the time, the debate between Assembler-language versus C for application programming was still hot and heavy. Programs written in Assembler took longer to develop and had more bugs to detect, ferret out, and correct, but […]
Inside or Outside?
Housing prices in Phoenix have skyrocketed with the influx of Californians. With their excess cash, they are “California-ing” the houses including the addition of concrete block fencing in front of the house, and sometimes all the way across the front of the property, albeit a low one. For now. They’re beginning to remind of me […]