Dog Ear
May 21, 2020
ave writing advice this week in, of all places, the Squiffy forum (Squiffy is an easy-to-use text adventure game maker). Since I’ve been messing for squiffy for years, I’ve gotten to be a SME on site and I usually provide answers. But the other day, I happened to glance at the general forum where you can post damn near anything. Someone had written a story about his uncle and was asking for critiques. The story was slow. It didn’t get anywhere quickly. It didn’t hold my interest. I couldn’t get more than a few paragraphs. And so I wrote the […]
May 7, 2020
nteresting call from mom the other day. As mentioned in the last DOG EAR, I was hunkering down and dealing with the depression of plague politics. But she called and I was in mid-something, so I put it down and talked. She told me that she’d been sitting around in her own doldrums and saw my novel, Fire and Bronze, under her coffee table. I’ve always seen it there and it’s always given me a little pride. You see, my dad and I had little in common as I grew up. He had been an only child and had done […]
April 30, 2020
‘ve always been honest enough with myself to not try to anticipate how I would respond in an emergency. What would I do if someone held a gun on me? What would I do if I was faced with a chance at total corruption for total gain? Could I sell my soul? Easy to “pre-brag” about yourself but me, I’m not so sure. How would I deal with a mid-air emergency if I had a plane? Always wondered. Two hours post-solo in my little red ultralight, I found out. I was climbing steep and hard off Lake Apoka (it was […]
April 23, 2020
’ll admit that Facebook really brings out the worst in me. Mostly because of you twits. With all that’s going on in the world, all the blame, counter-blame, the alternative history; it’s like I’m Don Quixote and every idiot out there is a windmill. I’m easily baited by faulty logic, simplistic equivalencies and straw man projection. I feel the need to answer. And then I feel the need to check for the reply, so I can answer, reply, answer, and the monkey’s got his fist in the anthill hole again. I had to drive an hour out of town to […]
April 16, 2020
’m really getting the concept of life in a plague and political turmoil. In many of the historical novels I read, plagues happen. Generally the town becomes quiet save for the rumble of the carts carrying away the dead. At the edge of town, spades eat at the soil, expanding the plague pits. Occasionally doors are marked with an X or whatever to mark a contagious house. And I haven’t lived under a rise of fascism, through I read all about it in Winds of War. Now we have crazed political responses (we just cut funding to the World Health […]
April 9, 2020
unkering down for the third week of quarantine and making scans of Hulu for just about anything watchable. Found something called Fyre Fraud which looked curious. It’s a documentary about a total failed (and pretty fraudulent) concert that dumped thousands of Millennials on some desert island in the Bahamas. Good flick. Yes, I’m old enough that I didn’t know anything about this – totally off my radar. But what was really interesting was how the Fyre organizers (and their legion of support staff, social organizers, investment opportunists and social gadflies) did this. I’ve had my brush with fame and self-promotion. […]
April 2, 2020
his is strange. I’ve just seen whole days slide by that I cannot account for. When I started retirement six months back, every day was a golden chance to work on stuff, get things done. I was writing, coding, bike riding, going to two clubs, everything. And now suddenly there is a stay-at-home order and I’m stuck. I’m noticing (and just speaking for myself here) that my creativity is in the crapper. I just feel bored with everything. I can’t confirm the origin of these feelings, of course, but there is always the element of worry. We live pretty tight […]
March 26, 2020
kay, you vanillas – please try to stick with this until the end of the piece. So we’re in the middle of a pandemic, one that a lot of people (especially young people) don’t take seriously. Lots of parties, trips to theme parks, all that. I’ve posted numerous things on Facebook on the importance of distancing but it hit me – outside of my nieces and a couple of young guys who don’t like me anymore I don’t think there are many people under twenty-five in my FB friends. So either you already know it or you’re not going to […]
March 19, 2020
o for last week’s column, I wrote something about people forcing their phone media on you. That afternoon, I met three crazy ex-work ladies at Applebees and hung out with them for about four hours. As we bid each other goodnight, little did I imagine how different everything would be a week later. Now we’ve been staying homeside for about five days. Very quiet. Been working on my games and my writing. Still doing bike rides. Even took the wife out on the tandem to a small park where we ate dinner on a bench, just to get out of […]