In the ink well

Dog Ear

April 14, 2016

Spring Cleaning! (DOG EAR)

n The Name of the Wind, the magical university library sprawls across dusty space and time, it’s indexing part of a constant war between librarian factions. Some systems would be by title, some by subject, some by magical context. Bureaucratic wars are fought – indexes are burned, and the library, it ends up as a massively confusing collection of books. I was facing a similar problem with my own Library of Alexander. When I started doing reviews five or so years back, I was just blogging about things I was reading. I’d let my website sort them out, just popping […]
April 7, 2016

A verbal plea (DOG EAR)

kay, so not so much writing as communicating and identifying a new (or somewhat old) trend. I recently watched an impassioned message by comedian Sarah Silverman on Facebook. She’s making the pitch for Bernie Sanders. Yeah, I like her and I like Bernie – I voted for one of them recently, not sure which. This issue here is not political, though. It’s toastmastersical. I noticed, as I watched the video through, that the stream breaks and breaks and breaks, as if they shot it a number of times and pieced something together. To me (with my boomer viewpoint) this appears […]
March 31, 2016

The Adventure Begins (DOG EAR)

otta make this vague – too much real-world tie in here. But there is a point to be made. Sometimes things happen, especially between the individual and the group. Wars begin over a slight between princes. Men are called into the dusty street to slap leather over a quip. The course of lives change over the smallest of things. Without being specific, such a thing recently happened between myself and a group and I didn’t see it coming, I hated it when it happened, burned in shame the entire evening, and lay in bed the entire night thinking of what […]
March 24, 2016

Johnny Pulpseed (DOG EAR)

edia comes at us pretty fast these days. Where people in the “old days” (such as the 40s) might have a newspaper, the radio, and billboards, now we have full internet streaming, pop ups, on-demand movies and TV, all through our phones (well, your phones. I don’t do that). It’s understandable that we can get behind. I was that way with my Model Railroader magazines. I had about 6-8 of them sitting beside my bed still in their wrappers. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read them. No, I did. But I just didn’t have time. Between the stars, […]
March 17, 2016

Wet Shoes (DOG EAR)

verybody thinks that writing is about sitting behind a huge desk with a scholarly air, sliding paper into a typewriter and rattling off clever prose. I’ve said this before. And I’ve told you it isn’t. Another story of wretched writing! So we had a model train operation session at the club the other night. I mentioned this on the train blog HERE, but really, it comes down to me to get everything ready, from cleaning track to setting up the dispatcher computer to getting jobs finalized. It was raining so our attendance was down, and we were packed with guests, […]
March 10, 2016

Near miss at 40,000 feet! (DOG EAR)

found myself off a quiet little street in noisy big Delhi last week, inside a nookish bookshop. I was looking for a fashion magazine for a friend, not thinking I’d find something for myself. But there on the shelf was a  used copy of Gods of War, Indian sci-fi by Ashok Banker. The woman shop owner was letting her daughter (she must have been all of twelve, cute-as-a-button, and giving us bold loud Yankees sidelong glances) work the transaction. She counted my change back very precisely, unlike the stores stateside where they just dump it into your palm, unable to […]
February 4, 2016

Writing Fast (DOG EAR)

‘ve been distracted by a coming trip, halfway round the world. Came in to work today thinking of air travel, of winter storms, of all the things yet to get, of packing, of preparation. But it’s Thursday and time for a pre-written version of DOG EAR, crafted weeks before, to pop up. Logged in to check the update and found there wasn’t any. I’d run out. I know I have a couple I’ve posted from various coffee shops and eateries, things I thought about and wrote at the moment. Presumably they are all sitting in my in-box, still waiting for […]
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 […]
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 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 […]