General Blog

So this isn’t only once or twice. Every time I go to the bathroom at work (not the touch and go numbah one, but the big brown effort), one of the two stalls is closed. I’ll sit on my own little seat and there will be a set of shoes under the wall, as motionless as an Afghan rifleman in the rocks. Worse, bathrooms are tiled, perfect for magnifying sounds. Knowing there will always be a certain… um… outburst… (in the words of HG Wells, “He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of […]

Yesterday we attended niece Kirstin’s graduation. We got to their house early and lounged around with family for a bit (I think I snoozed). Went to UCF for the ceremony (I’d gotten a degree from that joint but not much else). If anything, it’s sprawled out since I was there. How sad to see little on-campus rows of fake shops, Subway and Dominoes and the like – I remember Blacksburg and the dingy (yet real) downtown street. At least I didn’t ever go to this… Stepford. Anyway, this isn’t about me, its about her. Kirstin graduated Summa Cum Laude from […]

The sun is only hinting across the 5am sky. The world is pretty peaceful on a Sunday. I’ve been up since, oh, 2:30am. It’s load night. Three times a year, my corporation shuts everything down and loads a new release. Thirty times over my career here, I’ve been up to work it. Years ago, we’d actually go down to the ops center and watch the data flow in (like water into freshly cut irrigation canals). Now its all done from our desks. And of course, it’s for free. I don’t get a dime. It used to be (back in the […]

Been digging about on Elance for the last few weeks, searching for a cover artist for Early ReTyrement. Originally picked out a perfect set of guys in India but they never responded. Another group turned me down flat. So I fired a reworked version of the request into the general pool and now I’ve got ten responses. Most of those I know I won’t go with, but there are two that are pretty good. I’ve queried both artists further, making sure they are quoting for what I want. Many of them have wildly differing styles, so I want to make […]

I got the first cut from my artist at work today. The email came in, I gulped, I gasped. What if it was a cock-up? What if it was horrible? Then I clicked on the attachment. Magnificent! And here it is…                                           I couldn’t believe how much I liked it. I’ve been thinking of this book for years, how the cover would look, what it would show. I wanted Mason in the middle of ranks of Persians and Greeks, with […]

So here is the final working cover art for Early ReTyrement. Michael Metcalf, who I commission off Elance, did a stellar job through all my little changes. He actually researched Persian dress and foot ware for the time, to get the illustration right. This has been the cover I’ve envisioned since 2002, when I was ready to go to print (the publishing industry, it seemed, wasn’t quite as ready as I). I’d long dreaded that they would muck this cover up, perhaps with something silly or stupid or simplistic. No, I wanted nice-guy Mason, the ranks of soldiers, the crowding […]

My dad once gave me a picture that said, “Cats do not tell all they know.” That’s very true. Had cats while growing up, but as an adult I’ve had three special cats. The first, Scud East, a little English shorthair, I picked up from the VPI swine barn. He was my pal through college and those years following, always at my side and never straying (even when we went for walks). Having grown up amidst dorm room D&D games where he charmed the players, he always considered himself a small human, seeing no difference in what we did and […]

“The Semantic Web works beautifully, by the way. It’s not like your foul litter Internet – so full of spam and crime.” -Black Swan Bruce Sterling Tuesday night I was working on cleaning up Early ReTyrement. My pal Mike Krzos had come up with all sorts of observations everyone had missed and I wanted to get them in. However, in the time travel section where Mason vanishes from Daytona Beach and ends up in Tyre, I stated that he fell thirty feet into the water (the idea being that he’d move to a different location on the globe and a […]

To the horror of my parents, I’ve always been a socialist of sorts, a wandering spirit looking for the government supporting its members as members, where people don’t die under bridges or in shabby nursing homes. Before everyone trots out their tea party rhetoric and Fox and Friends viewpoints, let me say that this is pretty much a one-man debate, a personal deliberation. I’ll occasionally discuss the matter with my libertarian friend Jesse Markowitz, if only because he is one of the few people left who openly discusses things on merit rather than what passes for Yankee debates these days […]

Well, this has been a long and hard struggle. I’ve picked up a nasty virus, once that hammers performance, respawns, and redirects all web searches. God knows what else its doing. The other day, I contacted the highest-rated Orlando tech firm. How that rating (on thumbtacks.com) was determined, I don’t know. The guy said they were experts at virus removal, that they could make it all better, that they would tune everything and my computer would be “like new”. Elated, I gave them my old laptop and left with a glow of hope. False hope, it would seem. When I […]