Blog – Page 88 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 7, 2016

Polishing (DOG EAR)

art of writing is improving. Writing can always be improved. Trust me on this – I look at old blogs and short stories I’ve written and see where things can get better. So I’m at a break in Tubitz and Mergenstein. I’ve got the third section done and am gathering myself for the fourth. I’ve got other projects I’m attending to (trains, stars, work, reading, everything). But I’ll get back to it. This morning I found myself in Juniors, our little round-the-corner diner where my wife and I read through our brunch and chat about our stories on the way […]

January 10, 2016

ShowLog – Deland – 1/9,10/2016

t was, without a doubt, the best of times and the worst of times. In sheer bad luck, the truck pulling our trailer had a flat battery and got to the fairgrounds late. Road construction shook the living poo out of our modules, causing all sorts of breakage. And when the layout went live, it shorted across the panel, red lights everywhere. Oh, and my techno aces were mostly at a convention or out in the ocean somewhere. Deep breath. Okay, the panel was an easy fix – someone had bumped the digitrax box off the run mode. And the […]

January 10, 2016

Hunter’s Run (Review)

ave I ever steered you wrong? The Martian? The Name of the Wind? All those novels I read first and either warned you off or pushed you into the bookstore after? Yeah, who’s your friend? Who has your back? It’s almost as if I’m you. So, Hunter’s Run. Goddam. Get it! So a guy is on the run for a back alley dumbass murder, a guy we really don’t care about. Ramon Espejo is nothing more than a back-alley chump on a dirty little back-alley Hispanic colony planet. Knowing that a dozen people watched him gut a gringo, he decides […]

January 14, 2016

Take two. Take three. (DOG EAR)

he mood-setting scene takes place in a volcanic dome on the moon (which is populated billions of years ago in Tubitz and Mergenstein, my steam-punk fantasy). So this port I’ve mentioned earlier, Kedgewater Deep, is inside this half-dome, the floor smooth as ice, the town built around the inner edge. Overhead through the crater, the stars shimmer. And there stands the Earth, named ‘Tellus’ (a way of concealing the obvious here – it’s Latin). I wanted my “moon” to contribute to the scene. The first idea was to make it a “Harvest Tellus”, swollen and angry, glowing into the crater […]

January 17, 2016

Damnificados (Review)

amnificados is one of those weird little books that edge over from the real world into serendipitous fantasy. The real story behind this involves an abandoned office/apartmen Caracas, Venezuela, one which was taken over by the city’s abandoned people, the trash pickers, the beggers, the squatters, the panhandlers, the crimples, the outcasts, and likely the review writers. Lead by Necho, a little cripple, the hordes are stymied by their first impediment to occupation, namely a pack of wolves denning in the entry. Once these large feral creatures are removed, the tower can fulfil its primary function, providing a place for […]

January 21, 2016

Cotton Candy (DOG EAR)

gain, what’s a movie-reference-laced blog doing in a writing column? Well, it’s all about storytelling. For the record, I like the movie How to Train your Dragon. I love the cat references in particular. And the flying. And even though the symbolism about missing body parts and the links they forge is a little over the top, yeah, it’s okay. I even own a copy. The other day, I took Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress to my mom’s place. I’d mentioned to my niece that this is where Lucas got the idea of the two robots as the central theme of […]

January 23, 2016

Three Moments of an Explosion (Review)

‘ve raved about China Mieville in the past. On my reviews, I’ve noted my enjoyment of Embassytown and The City & The City. The guy writes some weird and beautiful shit. But I guess I’m getting older or he’s getting more extreme or whatever. Three Moments of an Explosion is his latest effort, a collection of workshop writings and experimental stuff. And while some of it is wonderfully beautiful and frightening and though provoking, others just left me on the station platform scratching my head. I simply didn’t get their points. Some of the notables – Polynia – for no […]

January 24, 2016

A full rack of balls (1/24/2015)

agreed with the fool’s lack of hesitation when CFAS agreed to host an impromptu dawn viewing of the planets. The entire rack of them would be up: Mercury (in a tree-top cameo), Venus (with her self-important illumination), Mars (sulky and red), Jupiter (on stage from the first act, and falling to the west), and Saturn (perfectly placed, the little angle). Even the moon was up, well to the west behind a building but full and missed. Did I leave something out? Oh, the Earth. My telescope doesn’t depress that low. However, at 3:30am this morning, with temps frozen at 30 […]

January 27, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/27/2016

ome nights hosting club ops, you got to be all in. Like, driving rain so a lot of members didn’t come out. But we were filled with guests. Then the phone system went out. Then Bob Martin’s back went out. I thought I was going to black out. A couple of members looked at the confusion of the crowd (about a quarter of them were visitors) and said I should dispatch instead of the kid. So in all the madness, the mud and the muddle, I’m standing there looking at the call sheet where I just put my name in […]

January 28, 2016

Word choice (DOG EAR)

veryone says something accidently. You’ll be telling a joke and only afterwards find out that someone in your group is in AA, or Jewish, or something. That’s the problem with the spoken word – once the jaw-gate is open, words are off like a shot. For writing, we have a lot more time to consider our dialog. We might come back and read something we’d written and rethink it. Things might be over-the-top vulgar (requiring dilution) or they might be overly PC (requiring backbone). But unlike the spoken word, with writing we have time to be pithy, clever, shrewd, and […]