robert.admin – Page 210 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 21, 2012

Rejection (DOG EAR)

This was how my story started… The shotgun trembled in Hector’s grip, his crucifix tinkling across its twin barrels. He was frightened – dry-mouthed, ass-puckered frightened – more frightened than when Mr. Sethman had come to their town meeting with his damned proposition. But this current fear wasn’t diluted by misgivings and second-thoughts. This fear was final. And this was how the rejection started… Choosing which stories to accept has been a difficult decision, and we regret that we won’t be taking it for the collection. It was a very creative semi-western, semi-gothic, all-wonderfully-bonkers-and-evocative piece, and we hope that it […]

June 17, 2012

Casca, the Outlaw (Review)

Let me just say that this review has all sorts of tangles to it. I’ve reviewed the Casca series in total recently (HERE). I really liked them, not for their literary sake, but just for the blunt idea of the thing (an eternal mercenary that fights in every battle across history). I’d read up to #22 where I’d finally stopped, but mentioned they were up to #37. So at Oasis 25 (a scifi convention I attended as a dealer), my booth was right next to Michael Goodwin’s, who’s written two of these himself. It was one of those bookish-small-world moments, […]

June 14, 2012

The man with the can (DOG EAR)

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” -Anton Chekhov I don’t know who this old black man is. Usually I see him on days I bike in, over on the other side of Lake Destiny Road, going south to my north. He’s always riding a ratty little bike, so non-descript I can’t really remember what it is – maybe one of those banana-bikes popular twenty years ago, […]

June 14, 2012

Penny-farthing

Was in a melancholy mood on my way to the dentist this morning. It was supposed to be riding day but this side trip ended that. Saw a cyclist commuter a mile or so out and heaved a sigh. Even with the heat and effort and danger, I wished it was me. Then I saw her. On the Lakemont bike lane, she was riding one of those old fashioned bikes (penny-farthings are one name for them). But this wasn’t an old one – it looked remilled, built along those lines. She was sitting about four-five feet up, just spinning that […]

June 12, 2012

DOH! Apologies to my registrants!

A couple of months ago, I changed the setting for registration, allowing people to pretty much autoregister themselves. It was not a big thing. Been seeing people join the site since then. Didn’t really pay it any attention. After all, they were registered now, right? Wrong. Last night while moving columns about, I happened to duck into the user lists and saw about 30 people who’d registered and not been “approved”. I’m not sure if that meant you couldn’t post or get it easy or whatever. I didn’t know I’d dorked it up. But that’s what you get from a […]

June 11, 2012

A new arangement!

I‘ve been thinking about this for a while. The Book and Writing blogs are what this site is about – it’s what I think a lot of the writers I’ve met and corresponded with are most interested in. Well, before I formalized the postings about writing, it used to show up in the general blog. Once I formalized it, I marked it “Dog Ear” and moved it in with the book reviews. There are people interested in reading. There are people interested in writing. But not all readers are writers and vice-versa. After some consideration, I’ve decided to break the […]

June 10, 2012

The World Set Free (Review)

According the Wells, all it will take for world socialism and sunlit-fields-upon-high utopia are radioactive volcanoes. The World Set Free was written in 1913 (under the looming war). In its format, it’s very similar to In the Days of the Comet, another Wells’ book. We have a “Dickens” view of the world, bleak and unfair and evil (I agree with him on this). The middle act is the disaster, the events so amazing that it would take Hollywood in all its CGI to do them justice. And after that, the level world reexamines itself, sorts itself out, corrects itself (and […]

June 9, 2012

Time Tripper

There was an old solitaire board game, years ago, called Time Tripper. It was a hoot to play – a grunt in Vietnam (contemporary when the game came out in 1980) falls back in time and finds himself fighting Romans and dinosaurs and all sorts of things. I mentioned the creativity behind it HERE. Anyway, the game is up and you can play the current cobbled version (its still being worked – not complete, but free, all the same). You can track down the free versions on our Facebook page devoted to the project by clicking HERE. The game and […]

June 7, 2012

Creativity (DOG EAR)

Creativity. Those who don’t have it (who talk on cellphones or watch TV in the evenings) don’t get it. But we, the people who walk silently with eyes on the invisible or who do more than doodle during tedious office meetings, we have it. Creativity. An example was yesterday – slow day at work with an unexpected extension we didn’t need. Not much to do. Fine. But for fun, I’ve been working on a computer game at home, an excel takeoff of “Time Tripper”, a time-travel/combat game from 1980 that I loved to play. The game itself was clever (I’m […]

June 6, 2012

Naturally good?

Yes, I know I haven’t written much here. I’ll have to post about some fallout I got from an earlier post on a bike forum. But mostly book stuff and twice-weekly literary postings have gotten in the way. I’m still riding, three times a week. Just a quick comment for today – was in an ethical debate with someone who was arguing that people are inherently good. I had to ask her if she ever rode a bike in the street. You know, commuting. A bike as part of the flow, part of the mechanized society, a component of transport. […]