In the ink well

as going to lunch, my wife and another couple the other day. Mentioned I was reading The Eyre Affair. The woman in the front seat hardly turned. “By Jasper Fforde”? I blinked. “Wow! How would you know that?” She told me she’d started it a couple of weeks ago. Me, I’m midway through and really enjoying it. I started to babble about how funny it was (militant astronomer groups?) and she sniffed (you couldn’t hear it, but all the evidence was there for a down-her-nose dismissal). “Oh, I dropped it after the first chapter. It wasn’t very good.” I started […]

t’s been a rough couple of weeks. Actually, looking back at that opener, I nearly deleted it because of its triteness. Rough? Forty-nine dead in my hometown, then Dallas. And this brings up my feelings about the massacre at Virginia Tech, my alma mater. Yet through it all, on Facebook, with friends and at work, I get to listen to simplistic statements, slogans, and opinions of people who want to take tragedy and reshape it in my mind. As if in my quiet and thoughtful life, where I bike or drive across the city without the distraction of radio or […]

t’s been a weird sorta a year. Maybe it’s because my site pulls in about 200 readers per blog (not many, but I’m proud of the hits). Or maybe it’s because I’ll chat about books and reading at work and over at the model train club. But I’m known as a writer and a reader, and suddenly this year I’ve been buried in loaned books. Last year it started with The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man’s Fear, two monster books you can use to chock a car’s wheels to keep it from rolling. And then the deluge […]

is complexion was dark, the eyes and hair almost black; the former very bright and penetrating; his brow was high, broad and square; his nose was prominent, and there was about the mouth an expression of firmness, not unmixed with kindness. This from Caesar’s Column, a book by Ignatious Donnelly, written ornately in 1890. Now, I understand the baroque dialog of the time and often (as in the case of War of the Worlds) love it. But here it gave me pause. And not in a reflective good-way. No, I had to stop and decode what was being said. So, […]

kay, trust me on this. You want to click down this link. Yes, this is Robert telling you this: the star-peeping, train-running, cat-petting, bike-riding guy. Have fun!    CLICK TO PLAY MY ADVENTURE.   >>>CLICK TO BUY MY BOOK!<<<

kay, Sherlock, figure this one out. A friend loans me the book Shades of Grey. From that alone, is the writer English or American? My head is filled with a lot of useless rubbish. I can remember scenes from movies so trivial it would make your nose bleed (in the afore-mentioned Shades, there is a reference to the line “And don’t you yell at me, Mr. Warwick!” – I instantly got it). And so, that question – Yankee or Limey, which is it? I read somewhere that that color between black and white, the one with fifty shades? If you […]

t was about the hardest thing I’ve ever read (the review is already up), The Republic. Not that the contents were difficult. I just had a hard time focusing on it. Listening to Plato’s version of oh-so-clever Socrates lay out logical lines of reasoning really became tedious. And with his listener supplying gushing large amounts of “Such is true” and “It is how you say” and “Dat’s a fact, Jack!”. Really, it’s like those times I sit in a diner or bar and overhear blowhards a table or two down talking about a political candidate I simply cannot fathom or […]

e’ve talked about the importance of hooks, and how critical it is to draw a short-attention-span audience into buying/reading your masterwork. So how about character development? Shouldn’t we be able to form our character descriptions quickly? Hundreds of years ago, traveling troupes set up archetypes so that ignorant peasants in every village wouldn’t have to suffer the drag of character development. Scaramouch was always the trickster and weaver of plots. Harlequin was the mute jester. And so on. The characters dressed and acted according to their established types and were known immediately to their audiences. So here’s a good example […]

kay, this one seems like a natural for me. You might have heard of Gamebooks. These are the branching type of adventures we used to see in all the wargame shops in the 80s. In them, you’d buy a book and read the opening chapter. Perhaps you were crossing a picturesque stone bridge and realized there was a troll under it. The story would break, and you’d see something like If you want to fight the troll, goto page 14. If you want to cross the bridge and continue up the path, goto page 24. Each of those pages would […]

t’s funny how creative and not-so-creatives view the very act of creation, but it’s certainly differently. See, I see it that I’m working with Squiffy, a sharp little adventure creator. You remember those old adventures where the computer would tell you a scene (“…You are in a path in the forest. The road runs north and south. To the east, there is the sound of rushing water. What will you do…?”) Yeah, back then we played about every Scott Adam’s adventure there was. Anyway, Squiffy lets you do this fairly easily (had to learn a couple of java script tricks). […]