Annette Snyder runs a cool blog called Fifty Authors From Fifty States. She just put up a post by me. Have a look, then check out all the others.
Category: Life
It’s Friday
So it is. I’ve been crunching away on line edits all week and having a good time. The weather has been pleasant, at least compared to last week, and a couple of mornings I’ve been able to turn off the air and open the windows while working. I loaded up the CD changer with classical—Respighi, Strauss, Grieg—and did fresh ground coffee.
During breaks, I’ve been playing with pictures again. You know, you make damn near anything fascinating, even beautiful in a dark, bizarre way, with enough patience and mods. For instance:
Someone pointed out that in the past something like this would have taken a dozen Kodalith masks and posterization steps. …
Pathological Hypocrisy
I thought I might leave this alone, but some itches are too difficult to leave unscratched. Others have posted about Rick Santorum’s unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion. You can read the article here.
Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life. As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus. She had a 105 degree temperature. She would have died without the procedure.…
Memory Day
It’s Memorial Day. Lot’s of flags flying around the neighborhood, most of them made in China. Barbecues will permeate the air with the hunger-inducing aroma of charcoal and burning meat, the pop-spritz of cans opening will mingle with the sounds of conversation, laughter, and portable stereos pumping out classic rock or C & W quasi-patriotic gunk.
We bought a push mower this morning from Home Depot. Go green.
I would like to take a few moments to tell you what I feel and have felt about this country.
I grew up on a steady diet of John Wayne and wanting very much to make my dad proud. …
Still Here
So, it’s the 23rd of May now. I heard on the radio this morning someone claiming that we’re now in the Tribulations and that we’ve got 153 days before the actual end of the world. That might be just about enough time for me to finish the rewrite on my desk and the new novel I am now half-finished with.
I thought about writing something scurrilous and amusing, but why? People who would laugh at it don’t need to be reminded that this was silly and those who wouldn’t laugh likely wouldn’t read my blog anyway. And there’s the story about the kids whose parents, utterly convinced that this was the weekend, had quit their jobs and went on Mission, handing out tracts and stopped paying attention to the college fund the kids were acutely aware of. …
Rapture Ready
This weekend, it’s supposed to be all over. Harold Camping of the Family Radio evangelist organization has announced the Rapture for May 21st—at six P.M.
In my own little patch of interest, the SFWA Nebula Awards will be given out this weekend. If Mr. Camping is right, this will be the last of these. Going out in grand style, that.
I don’t have a lot to say about this other than it’s silly. It’s one more reason that makes me wonder about the people who follow this kind of nonsense. I can’t help but think that, beneath all the sanctimony and babble, a lot of these folks are just, well, unfortunate. …
A Different “Doctored” Photograph
For something less fraught with the concerns of the day and a bit more fun. They say you ought not take photographs from a moving car, but sometimes it’s the only way to get certain shots.
And yes, this is heavily worked over. I wanted an extra rainy effect. This is something I was never able to achieve in color before and in B & W only by chemical abuse of the film.
I’m completing some of the online galleries—this one finishes out the Experimental gallery, which is filled with images that I have played with at length. It might not be immediately obvious in some of them that they are, indeed, experimental insofar as the extent of manipulations are concerned, but they are all distortions of what was Actually There.…
Invisible Women
I’m taking time out (already) from all the rewriting I have to do to complain and restate a principle.
Here’s a lovely little bit of misogyny.
Read the article? A newspaper took the photograph of the ready room where Obama and his cabinet received the news of Bin Ladin’s death and photoshopped out the women present. For reasons of “modesty” they claimed. They then apologized but asserted they have a First Amendment right to have done this.
Inadvertently—and I am sure they didn’t think about this when they did it—they gave Bin Ladin a small cultural victory out of his own death. …
My Obligatory Piece About Ayn Rand
From time to time, here and there, someone brings Ayn Rand up as some kind of role model. Lately it’s even in the national news, thanks to the Tea Party and an apparently not very good film of Rand’s seminal masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. The uber conservatives now crowding reason out of the halls of congress with their bizarro legislation and their lectures from the floor and on committees about how their toilets don’t flush right so why should regulations on light bulbs be passed are the children of the Dragon’s Teeth cast randomly by Ms. Rand and her philosophical cult followers. …
Between
I completed a massive rewrite the other day and sent it out. Â When I say massive, I mean big, a whole novel. Â There’s a lot riding on this and I find myself fidgety and on edge in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. Â It was an older book, one I thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) was done, complete, just fine. Â What I found was proof that I need a good editor.
But the work is done and it’s out the door and all I can do now is wait for the yea or the nay.…