In the ink well

ome of you might have noticed that the site has gone largely dark over the last few weeks. No updates. No opinions. No grousing about the sorry state of entertainment, media and literature lately. Most of you haven’t, of course. I’m keeping track of names, just like Santa. Anyway, the reason for this wasn’t a failure of courage or and onset of writers block. Nope. Carpel Tunnel. I have it in my left hand, not because of typing or anything, just hard use. So the bone and cartilage in my left wrist tightened up around the nerves and suddenly I […]

t’s hard to covey just how bad my work day was – this is the middle of three days of Program Increment meetings, the hardest one for me. Today my team has to figure out what it needs to do. We have a limited time to task up our board. Management is forcing work on us (regardless of the principles of non-intervention in Agile). And as a scrummaster, I’m running from room to room, up and down stairs, trying to pull everything and everyone together in this shambles of effort over four hours without lunch (well, cold Olive Garden spaghetti) […]

ast week I wrote about coming up flat for a blog entry (actually, I rallied and got a respectable piece out of it). But I’ll confess that even after lumping it out over lunch at the desk, I was still zombiefied for the rest of the day. Drones were lining up at the desk, the IM light was flashing and some poor sod even tried my phone. When I got home, I slept four hours before even trying to rustle up dinner. But it was getting home that made all the difference. You see, unlike virtually everyone else on the […]

always say that there are days when you won’t feel like writing. Like, say, today. It’s Thursday and I owe the vast consuming maw of the internet another short piece on writing. In that perfect world, I should have been developing a bit earlier in the week and refining it in my various downtimes (like when driving or even biking). Wednesday I’d take a break at work to compose something that I would review Wednesday night and post up Thursday. That would have been the plan. Reality is bleaker. In my reality, I’m playing with a couple of game design […]

ou might have read my piece from last week (if you didn’t, it’s HERE). In it, I blistered my company for not giving me recognition for an above-and-beyond assignment I worked on, and that thinking that a crayons-and-coloring-book seminar approach would settle things. Of course, Serendipity is a cruel bitch. I went back across the street to the hotel we were attending for this thing, and that’s when the VP from my department got up in front of over a hundred coworkers and told a story of dedication and commitment and what it means. And suddenly he’s talking about me. […]

“ come across my hating fair.” This from Poopdeck Pappy in the ill-fated movie Popeye. It’s a great statement from the top-down look. It says that hate (and anger and other passionate emotions) are not just felt, they are controlled and considered. I really like that. The thing is, I’ve mentioned that I’ve had a hard couple of months and work has significantly factored into this. Without going into details, all the things they claim they do (compassion, caring, teamwork), they, well, haven’t. I labored over long evenings for over a month and nobody said anything, did anything, or supported […]

ow that I’ve given up jogging and I’m doing quick lunch-time rush-writing (an hour each time, typing with one hand, holding my sandwich with the other) I’ve begun to notice a thing I do that I’ve only just identified. In fact, when I wrote Indigo years back during lunches, I’d do the same thing. So, what I’m doing is something I’ll call “bootstrapping”. Works like this. When I settle into writing, my mind enters a streaming state where part of it is imagining the moment of the scene. It pictures the characters, their actions and reactions, the pace of the […]

t’s been a hard couple of months for me, facing everything from a loved-one’s passing to the storm of a century (with more of those yet to come) to the inanity of our President (really, is it even  in doubt anymore?). At one point, doctors were testing me for a possible degenerative disease over a number of tense weeks (just Carpal-Tunnel, whew). And I’m getting older and not wiser, no, just creakier and more fragile. As mentioned in other pieces, I hurt myself jogging which has ended that for me. At least I’ve gotten the bike back under me. I […]

’ve jogged for years, ever since my first Corporate 5k. And I hated every step of it. When I cycle, there is motion and wind and fun. If I stop peddling I glide like an eagle (as opposed to jogging, where when I stop I feel black guilt). I’ve never felt that “runner’s high”. I’ve jogged and jogged and never gotten any better, holding a just-over 10 minute/mile rate. And my support squad, the Lunch Runners, has dropped from a dozen years back to… just me. But still I had a commitment to this; Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, even though […]

ll writers face impediments. Nothing kills a writing career like a wife (and, eventually, children). It’s hard to hold the edge when someone’s dumping a load into their diapers. Not that I’m blaming them – there are plenty of other distractions. In older days, there was absinthe in Parisian cafes, whisky in run-down gin joints. And now (sadly) the world is now full of very petty distractions. Computer games, streaming TV, Iphones; you name it, it’s out there. Even I have too many things – cycling, astronomy, model railroading, game design – to write my passions. The world is more demanding […]