Working on the novel again

Yep, I’m finally trying to finish the draft so I can finally, eventually, get to editing the damned thing and sending it out. However, I just realized that one of the plots I was using as background, really, honestly, ought to be foregrounded. It’s almost all centered on one character, who is peripheral to a lot of the real action; a Chinese (? or perhaps Indian, or even Croatian, I’m not sure… he needs some more development in my imagination before I write anything about him) bounty hunter who is hunting a group of Kurdish guerrillas (ie. terrorists), specifically one …

Continue Reading

Things We All Ought To See

Everyone should go look at the images and news at this site every once in a while. I don’t much care about strange sounds being heard on the space station but I do think that seeing images of space is about the closest thing we can have to that old story of the Romantic Era when poets looked at waterfalls and clouds and had intimations of the eternal, and felt holy terror at the immensity of nature and the tininess of themselves. This image, by the way, is of Venus in Pleiades. I remember seeing Pleiades, also known as the …

Continue Reading

Arbor Day

Life seems still to be all lotus blossoms springing from my every footstep. Our conversation was long, we laughed a great deal, and we understand one another; honesty, we dare even honesty. She asked me, out of the blue, the one question I didn’t expect, and which I was a little nervous to bring up myself at this point (though I would have eventually). And I answered her honestly, and she understood. Even that. “It’s a nice,” to use the words of my friend John Wendel. I’m not gonna go on and on about details here, but I will say, …

Continue Reading

My Superhero Identity

And I would have thought my super power would have had something to do with, I don’t know, my ability to recall Greek words a decade after last studying them. But oh no… Your Superhero Persona by couplandesque Your Name Superhero Name Emo Kid Super Power Incredible Stamina Enemy Frozen Corpse Of Walt Disney Mode Of Transportation Shopping Cart Weapon Celine Dion Albums Created with quill18‘s MemeGen 3.0! It’s kind of weird that I found the quiz at Marvin’s page, and got a pretty similar answer to what he got in the quiz. Hmm.

Continue Reading

What’s the most important thing in your life?

She squeezes my hand, and lets go. Her hands raised up to her either side of her face—an adorable gesture she does a lot—leaning on the table with a palm on each cheek, as she listens to my answer to her question. I can’t help but smile. “Well,” I tell her, “a year ago, or a few years ago, I would have given you a different answer.” And then I think for a few moments, and in the end I cannot find a word in Korean (of course, for my Korean is not that good), or in French (that language …

Continue Reading

My Ball

My ball is big and grey. It’s huge and soft and full of air. I am sitting on my ball. I bounce a little and I rock back and forth, side to side. I do all kinds of things with my ball, and it helps my back. This $20 ball I bought at E-Mart is a wonderful big strange grey thing in my apartment, and thank the heavens for it. But I think it’s time to go pay my massage ajumma at the local bathhouse a visit. She has arms as thick as my legs, and the last time I …

Continue Reading

Bad Movie Science

You can all thank Charlie for this: a website called Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics that goes through and dissects all the physics mistakes in films, with reviews that painstakingly show how and why Hollywood physics is just too unbelievable to bear, in a whole range of movies that include not only SF but also crime, historical drama, and more. It’s worth checking out, for a laugh if nothing else. Compliments, once again, to Charlie Bell.

Continue Reading

Weird Eganesque Brit TV-Show Dream

Last night I had this dream that, when I woke, was all kind of still there, present in my mind. I have absolutely no idea what this is all about, but I have this distinct feeling that it’s not the first time I’ve had a dream about this. It’s strange, though, because this was the final episode in the dream. Episode? Yes, episode. Because the dream is a British television series. I don’t know how or why I dreamt a British television series, but in any case, I did. The series was about a man. The man wasn’t anyone special, …

Continue Reading