Blog – Page 13 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 28, 2011

Who’d a thunk it?

Like Oddball and Kelly in Kelly’s Heroes, I don’ like officers. Corporate officers. They tend to frown at me, lie to me, and indirectly fire me. I trust them like I would a hungry lion pacing about. Or, as noted in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Universe, as far as I could spit a dead rat. But my current one, my managing director (i.e. my boss’s boss) is slowly winning my respect. He seems…. decent. How strange that is to me. He’s been straight-up, even when the company hasn’t been. He’s asked for my opinions and forwarded them up. And, most […]

June 30, 2011

Early ReTyrement – take 1

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 […]

July 3, 2011

Early ReTyrement – the working cover

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 […]

July 7, 2011

Cats and Dogs

I knew it was going to rain today. Right there in the weather forecast – couldn’t miss it. Rode anyway. How to explain this? Can’t tell you. Of course, there was a late afternoon meeting that went on until 5:45pm. Rain’s hitting the window, it’s dark as pitch, and everyone is gassing their way through everything they can possibly say. Finally, done. I go out as the woman who sits near me is leaving. She’s shaking her head at my madness – of course, she also told me about her recent white-water rafting expedition and how they flipped (twice). You’d […]

July 10, 2011

Fuzzy History

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 […]

July 16, 2011

Rivers of grass (Review)

Imagine reading a dramatization of a cancer or degenerative disease that has been slowly spreading through your body, one you were not fully aware of. You read of the wonderful nature of each organ, their function and interplay, and cringe as you follow their demise. The whole is breaking down. And you realize it is probably too late to reverse the process. This is pretty much what reading this beautiful, painful book is all about. Rivers of Grass follows the history of the Florida Everglades, from its geological makeup, its biological processes, its discovery and settling by nomadic Indian tribes, […]

July 18, 2011

The Potter legacy

The end of the world came and I didn’t notice it, what with the bike rides, the model train constructions, dinner with friends, work and wife. The last Harry Potter movie hit the screens. Facebook had rung like a gong when Casey Anthony got off. Now it was ringing against from all the Potter fans bellowing about what a wondrous thing this series was, how it taught their kids to read, about morals, ethics, the importance of good vs. evil, of fellowship, of commitment. Yadda yad. That the adult fans point to their children as the justification for their canonization […]

July 22, 2011

Hacked

“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 […]

July 23, 2011

Socialism

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 […]

July 26, 2011

Easy, Trigger…

Was riding home today, coming up on the busiest intersection (Lee and 17-92) when I heard this repeating noise, not quite a hiss, not quite a click, sorta like a something stuck to the tire or flapping against the supports. Put my head down as I took the sidewalk at the corner to wait for the light (call me a coward, but drivers come around that curve like Ben Hur in a chariot). Looked it over but couldn’t see anything wrong. Kicked off when I had the cross light, heard the noise again. Strange. Pulled over on the other side, […]