Is 1984 Here? By our own choosing? ...Yes, it is.

A few years ago, I was interviewed by Seth Shostack for NPR as a technology expert. The question was whether the surveillance tactics like those in 1984 are on their way. The truth of the matter is...They are here.

After a few minutes on Facebook, we can see that as a society, we have become somewhat narcissistic in posting everything from "Look at the Sour Cream and Bananas I ate this morning" to giving specific destinations for our business trips and vacations, relating the airport destination data for all to see. But that is REALLY just where it all starts in two very important and distinct ways.

First, that's not all the data that's being collected AND SHARED about you and second (and this is most important), what you don't realize is what is being done with this data. Data is being collected from you in sometimes very subtle ways. We all know that when we search for or buy items online we will then be bombarded with ads for the same or similar items. (No, I don't need more screwdrivers) In the tradeoff for convenience, we have sacrificed this level of privacy. This loss of privacy extends beyond the online purchases and, even creepier is how your data is connected.

There are also more nefarious ways to collect our personal information. When you play one of those silly games like "choose your super-hero name" and you use your Month that you were born with the street you grew up on to select two names. Why do you think they exist? They are there to collect your personal information! This is not paranoia, this is FACT.

The second point is what is done with the information. I recently purchased some spackle at Lowes in the actual brick and mortar store. When I got home, I was bombarded with ads around my Yahoo email for drywall screws at Amazon. Consider for a moment the speed, the connective power and just how much data is cross-referenced from all of our identifying items...like your Lowes "rewards" card.

As for the data that is being trolled for on Facebook in the form of silly games, who knows. We already know identity theft is a serious thing and easily carried out internationally. The questions like "What street you grew up on" or "your first Pet" are often used as security questions by credit agencies. Consider also, your Birthday (usually available on Facebook) is often a security question.

Other personal information like the names of your children and family, our favorite books, movies, and TV shows could also give a hacker some serious clues for cracking your password. If you've made it this far, I bet you are re-thinking your current password.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 

Anything that we don't want to be true is now, "fake news."

I've already written enough on the topic of the news, but it just proves that the conditions of 1984 are already here.  They are just not quite as drab looking...yet.

If the Government says it is!  Anything else is labeled "FAKE NEWS!"  Know that you could be lied to.  It's possible!  At least question things!

...and that's the way it was.

When Walter Cronkite uttered those words, "...and that's the way it was," not a single American, left, right, Africain American, Asian American, etc., would disagree on the content or bias of the facts presented.

As divided as this country was on so many issues during Mr. Cronkite's tenure, from the Vietnam war to racial or gender inequality, we didn't waiver or argue in our perception of reported facts by any of the popular news sources simply because it wasn't what we wanted to hear.

I try, VERY hard to be an objective person.  I try to use news sources that are not tainted by the left or the right.  As a citizen of the United States, it's almost unbelievable that I need to go OUTSIDE the United States to find one.  I go to the BBC for major headlines and news.

Unfortunately, Snopes.com has become necessary for almost any political or news post on social media, left or right.

What is worse, is that we cloud our own perception of what public opinion is by listening to news sources that tell us what we want to hear.  We tend to surround ourselves with people on social media who have the same left or right viewpoints.  To top it off, we have a president who feeds this left-right polarization and actually treats the media sources' ratings like they are a more important fact than the events that are shaping the world.

This has to stop! 

We will find ourselves in a new civil war, that is not separated by geography, but by left, and right ideologies that are being influenced by media ratings and external (possibly Russian) influence.

I have done my best to try and keep any of my opinions of left or right issues out fo this, in the hopes that this post can spread without political bias when we all agree we need a search for the real truth.

“Daddy…is this the Men’s room?”

…my three-year-old daughter asks me, as I guide her quickly past the men standing at the urinals toward the stall where she can do her business.

Some men give me strange looks as I bring my little girl into the men’s room. Most places don’t have a “family” restroom (although I am grateful when there is) and as a father of, now four-year-old twin girls, I am left with little alternative but to bring them into the men’s room.

If I want to take my little girls out for breakfast to give my wife some well-deserved alone time, or some time at the gym, restroom visits are a common thing. It seems no matter how much I try to make them use the bathroom at home before we leave, I have still seen the inside of every single men’s room of every family-friendly restaurant in the area.   

Somehow, there isn’t anywhere near as much of a stigma in bringing a three-year-old boy into the women’s room with his mom.  Perhaps it’s because there aren’t urinals in the women’s room. Perhaps it’s an echo of a previous generation’s expectations of it being “a women’s role” to take care of the kids “bathroom-business.”

It can be a difficult road to navigate for a modern dad. In addition to some of the stares, some of derision, some creepy and general looks of disbelief; some men also don’t always zip up their business whilst facing the wall… A quick turn and one of my hands becomes a make-shift blinder.

There is, of course, the added fun of the conversation with my daughters in the stall:

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“Thank you for sharing your room with me.”

“You’re welcome, sweetie.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“How do you go to the potty with one of THOSE,” points out of the stall toward the urinals, “potties?”

Stammers…

”Are you done now, sweetie?”

What is a father in the 21^st century to do?

Posting this while I can

Well, we just lost the Net Neutrality laws. 

Watching the FCC debates and votes were so difficult.  It's so obvious the corruption that has taken place there.  It's sad.

Don't think it will affect you?

Do you like Netflix?  What if your provided added a surcharge to your already complicated bill for bandwidth to their site?

How about Youtube?  Pandora?  Amazon Prime video? Hulu?  Slingbox?  DirectTV?

That's just to start. 

How about making any web site that wants to be seen pay a premium to your service provider.

The corrupt FCC chairman compared it to Twitter or Facebook allowing paid advertisers to get better placement. 

Except it's NOT the same.  I don't have to use Twitter or Facebook.  I can choose something else.  I DON'T have a choice of my internet provider.  No one else is available where I am.

Even for the lucky few that have something of a choice, you maybe have two possibilities.

The FCC said it doesn't need to regulate the internet providers because they are not like a utility, that the "data lines are nothing like a pipe." 

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  Did you ask ANY technical professionals?  That's exactly what we call it!

They said it won"break the internet."  Of course it won't.  But it will make it more expensive for you and me. 

Isn't that enough?

Would you believe ALL of our modern computing devices owe their basic architecture to a 19th-century weaving machine?

Standing in the basement of an old college building, looking at a collection of 19th-century weaving machinery, and in one moment the entire history of computing, even to this day in 2017 came to me.

It was 1990 and I was attending the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Philadelphia University).  As a favor to a professor, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I picked up a donated weaving machine and we delivered it to the basement of one of the main buildings, Hayward Hall. 

Surrounding us was an amazing collection of old fabric making equipment dating back to the 19th century.  I noticed a Jacquard weaving machine with some yellowing old punch-cards halfway fed through a mechanical reader.  In an amazing bit of mechanical engineering, this machine could mechanically, interpret the “on” and “off” instructions on a punch card to consistently reproduce a woven pattern on fabric.  

I remembered from a history of computing lessons that IBM adapted the use of punch cards sometime in the 1950s.  I even got some brief exposure to them myself in the 1970s, as some legacy equipment had yet to be replaced.  

What amazed me here, in examining the cards that the loom used, was that the cards hadn’t really been changed much for when they were adapted for computers.    They still had the same rows of eight dots (eventually there would be more than 8), punched or not punched.  These were a physical representation of 8 bits to one byte.  

This constant is the same today, in every computing device from supercomputers to iPhones.  Even though our chips got expanded to 16, 32, 64 and 128 bits, etc. All of these are still multiples of the original eight.

This was still not the moment of revelation.  It was when I saw the manual device that the operators used to punch the cards that gave me the biggest surprise.  The operator of the manual punch machine would sit on a simple metal stool, and feed the cards through the punching mechanism. The operator would grip two metal handles in front of them, that were shaped like small motorcycle handlebars.  The operator's fingers would rest on the eight buttons above the handle with the thumbs below.  The operator would press the appropriate buttons for the “ons” and “offs” for the pattern, then a foot pedal provided the actual punch of the holes.

This simple 19th-century punching machine has provided us with the basic architecture of our modern computing age.  All because of the shape of our hands fitting into a machine to punch cards for a fabric weaver.

The Total Perspective Vortex, from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Anyone who has stared up at the night sky on a clear night and tried to wrap their mind around the size of our planet, the Sun, the solar system, our galaxy, and then the hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond that may have felt like their mind might explode (or despair at the sheer insignificance of their life choices).

According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Total Perspective Vortex was designed to condense all the knowledge of the universe into a single moment, wherein a person would finally understand their place in the vast cosmos. Remember, that the universe is so mind-numbingly huge that anything imaginable can happen.

Instead of being enlightened by this moment of clarity, understanding the sheer magnitude of the universe and insignificance of one's perspective compared to all of that completely annihilates one's brain. An invisible dot on an invisible dot living in a tiny fraction of an eyeblink of the universe.

"You can kill a man, destroy his body, break his spirit, but only the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man's soul."

How Blind?

When The United States of America defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps, we proudly tore down the Nazi flag and raised the American flag!

When the towers fell on 9/11.  We took it back and raised the American flag again!

Would we allow someone to publicly salute the flag of Al Quaeda?

Then WHY??  Someone tell me WHY do we allow THIS flag to be raised here?  And our president to say "On BOTH SIDES??"

What if Bush had said "ON BOTH SIDES" after 9/11??

Y2K

Okay, this has to be said.  Y2k was a non-event.  Not because it wasn't a real threat, but

BECAUSE WE FIXED IT!!!

I worked at two different companies on this problem.  I was there for testing where we took devices like credit card readers, ATMs and even elevators advanced their dates.

You know what happened?

THEY STOPPED WORKING!!

So, to all of the people who think Y2k was some big hoax because nothing happened, you need to thank the teams that worked round the clock for years to make sure nothing happened.

Sorry, just had to speak my peace on this one.

" I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to."- Pump Up the Volume

The quote I'm using for the title was from a 1990s movie.  

Have things gotten any better?

As a child growing up in the 1970s, we could find heroes in fiction and reality.  Television's characters were mostly either over the top evil or over the top good.  The good characters may not have been realistic, but you could try to be as good as, Captain Kirk, Laura Ingles or Mike Brady.

They may have been unrealistically good, but shouldn't we strive for that?

Look at the remakes and reboots for some of TV's characters:

The new Star Trek's Captain Kirk is essentially OK, but kind of an @sshole.  Same with the reboot of Battlestar Galactica.  Replaced are the squeaky clean Lorne Green and Richard Hatch with characters you really don't want to emulate.

“'Oh, realism! Oh, here, oh, now, oh hell!'”- Ray Bradbury 

Ray Bradbury predicted this would happen decades ago in the Martian Chronicles.  

I haven't even started on reality TV.  There are NO people in there you would want to be like.  Across the board, reality television features people we either hate, despise or pity.  Otherwise they are not deemed "entertaining."  .

Even many of our childhood heroes get smudged, buy attention seeking people looking to smear someone's reputation and history for the sake of "entertainment."

I used to look up to people like John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.  Look what has happened to them in recent years with scandals and rumors of scandal.

Can you honestly think of a hero you have in recent decades?  Someone who stood out and wasn't smeared by someone somewhere.

I used to have Neil Armstrong and John Glenn.  After Armstrong's death (and some before) news came out about his divorce and what a bad husband he was.  Really?  I didn't need to hear that!  

John Glenn has held up.  So far the only other decent figure I could find was Mr. Rogers.  So far no one has been able to smear him.

Consider someone like Lance Armstrong.  I know I'm going to get beat up here, but hear me out.
Now, he has a reputation for not being a nice guy.  He's probably not a nice guy but, in beating cancer, starting the Livestrong Foundation and Charity he inspired people to survive and probably saved thousands of lives just by being an inspiration.  Nothing else.

I realize the search for truth is a squeaky clean attribute, but was it REALLY necessary to go back and smear what looked like a modern day "Superman." (Don't get me started to what they did to Superman).  Wasn't the inspiration he created and the lives he saved and the hearts he touched worth more than the outcomes of races run over a decade ago.

REALLY think about it.  What have we lost versus what have we gained??

Hath No Fury Wins Second Place in Literary Agency Contest

Urban Literary Agency just announced their winners from their 2015 contest.

My book, Hath No Fury,  got second place!

Here's the specs from the judge:

Author Name: Hal Rappaport

Title: Hath No Fury

Genre: Romance / Paranormal

How is the author’s writing?                                        

Poor

Okay

Good

Great

Is there violence?

No violence

Some violence

Graphic violence

Is there sexual content?

No sexual content

Some sexual content

Explicit sexual content

How is the story narrated?

First person

Second person

Third Person

Alternating persons

Wine and Pretzels

I am alone in my hotel room, on a business trip, staying at a Holiday Inn in Houston. 

I am eating pretzels left over from the bag I brought on my flight.  They were a snack I bought for the four hour flight from NJ to Houston. Airlines no longer serve meals on domestic flights. 

I am washing them down with the cheapest merlot money can buy.  It’s out of a juice box and poured into a plastic cup.  I suppose it would be worse if I were drinking it directly from the cardboard carton, but I figure that’s just a matter of degrees.

Is this a new low?

I’m not sure.

The wine was $3.99, and the pretzels cost almost the same.  Airports can charge pretty much anything these days.  We buy it because we are forced to be there.

It’s the middle of January and the thermostat in this room reads 77.  The environmental controls for this room either seem to want it to be freezing or uncomfortably warm.  I keep switching it back and forth because it won’t stay at any one temperature.  I figure if I switch it back and forth enough times it will rain in the middle of the room.

I’m not 100% sure why I am writing this stream of consciousness.  It’s not my usual style and pretty meaningless.  I think I just liked the title, “Wine and Pretzels.”  

Why There is a Second Ammendment

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Few people actually show the text.  When England's government became oppressive and unfair to the colonies, it was necessary to raise an army of Militia soldiers to defend and fight for freedom.  The authors of our Constitution knew, first hand what it was like to stand up to a bad government that was in power.  In their wisdom, they kept this check in the foundation of the new government they were forming.  This amendment was meant to keep a balance between the population and any government (like England) that could become corrupted.

Consider for a moment, Nazi Germany. Their government was a democracy similar to England. Of the 12,000,000 exterminated, if only 1% of them had firearms, there would be an armed force of 120,000. Think about what a difference it might have made.

It wasn't until after the war that Nokmim (Hebrew: הנוקמים‎), also referred to as The Avengers or the Jewish Avengers, a Jewish partisan militia was formed.  Forming a "militia."  Sound familiar?  Pity it was AFTER the war.

Are we in a Decline of our Civilization?

In the 1970s we had landed on the moon and space seemed to be our Oyster.  There was no reason to doubt that we would have lunar colonies by the end of the 20th century.  The Space Shuttle, although only an orbiter, seemed like the first step in building true re-usable spacecraft.  The planets like Mars and Venus seemed to be so close we could touch them next.

Even though we were in the middle of the cold war and competition with the Soviet Union was tense this (along with the release of Star Wars in 1977) actually fueled much of the advancement.  In a race that began with Sputnik in the 1950s, each side was trying to "conquer space" first.

In 1989 the wall in Berlin fell and with it came the fall of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.  With this epic event, which is regarded as one of the greatest moves toward peace on the planet, came the decline of our drive to push further into space.

I realize I am basing the entire civilization's ascension or decline on this one metric of space travel, but there are several points to this that I think make it a good indicator.

• The Space Race itself was the catalyst for developing a lot of the technologies we use today.
• It was one of the few items in our history as a species, that united us.
• Space technology may become necessary one day as an escape for the human race
• Space technology may become necessary one day to deflect a NEO (Near Earth Object) or Asteroid
• When you stop looking up and exploring, you drive inward.
• NASA provides the most compelling evidence in the arguments for climate change

This decade marks the retirement of our aging Shuttle fleet.  While NASA insists that they are moving forward with their new non-reusable rockets, it's clear that this really feels like a step backwards.  Where once, we looked to the Soviet Union with suspicion (and some admiration) we now see their once bold Orbiter fleet now sits and rots.

As some in power ignore the clear evidence of climate change, we may find ourselves rushing headlong into a world like the one predicted in interstellar.  Please take a look at the clip below.  If you haven't seen the movie, please watch this:.

While one might look up at the International Space Station and say that we ARE in space, consider the scale.  If we used the scale of a regular classroom globe the ISS would reside at a point about 3/4 of and inch (1.5 cm) from the surface.  Using the same scale the moon would be 14 feet away.  By those terms, humans haven't left the planet in over 40 years. 

"In Georgia, yet another Christian pastor is arguing that gays do not deserve to live"

What kills me is the "pick and choose" ability by so many people.  You can't just pick a quote and decide this one is literal, but the rest are not.

According to Leviticus, eating shellfish and pork are a death worthy crime.  Hell, if you follow the Old Testament (or the Torah to some of us) that closely, you shouldn't have a New Testament.

But let's look a little further here:

Leviticus 20:9  "“‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death." This would kill off most of the western world.

Leviticus 20:10 “‘If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death."

Anyone sensing a pattern here?

Leviticus 21 "“‘Priests must not shave their heads or shave off the edges of their beards or cut their bodies."- I wonder if he shaved this morning...or got a haircut...EVER!

Leviticus 19 ‘Keep my decrees.

“‘Do not mate different kinds of animals.

“‘Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed.

“‘Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

Sorry that means no:

GMOs,

Labradoodles

or Spandex.

Clearly, all "death-worthy abominations?"

The Face of Doctor who and the Science Fiction Fan

Some time in 1976 I discovered that my favorite television show at the time, Star Trek was listed as "Science Fiction" in the TV Guide.

Since this was a fairly "dry" period for new science fiction television, I thought I would scan the guide and see if I could find more shows that were also "Science Fiction."

I stumbled upon a show on PBS called "Doctor Who."  I had never heard of it before and neither had my parents or anyone else I had talked to at the time.

Now I grew up in the US in pretty big city, Doctor Who had been on the air in England since 1963, but it was still a pretty obscure thing in the states in the 1970s.  It was relegated to the "Nerd-ier" section of TV on the PBS stations as an unusual import.

Without knowing any of this, I watched my first episode "Pyramids of Mars" and was totally confused.  Still, the inside of the TARDIS seemed pretty cool, so I stuck with it.  I watched other Tom Baker episodes, not knowing anything about the history of the show, it's mythology (which it had even then) or it's fans.  I remember watching Tom Baker's regeneration into Peter Davison and scratching my head.

With Star Wars' release in 1977, pop science fiction and simple space opera became common.  We got some great surprises like Battlestar Galactica and some abominations like Quark.

Doctor Who remained in obscurity in the US.

In 1982 I met a guy in school who was an overly serious Doctor Who fan.  He was just happy to find ANYONE who even knew anything about the show.  He was convinced that Doctor Who didn't need a fan club, it needed an "Appreciation Society."  Yeah, I know it doesn't get any nerdier than that.

I knew he was a little overly serious, but the whole history of the show drew me in.  The older episodes were not yet available in the US and I learned there where whole seasons of the show that were supposedly lost or destroyed.

He lent me books of older episodes, which I devoured quickly.  It allowed me to catch up on  the long history of the TV show without being able to see the old episodes.

In the months that followed, PBS aired some of the Doctor previous to Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee.  Here is when I think I became a real "fan" of the show.

Unfortunately, the show's popularity was waning and it was cancelled in 1989.  Other than a few rumblings, it seemed Doctor Who was going to fade into British Myth and US obscurity.

In the 1990s, there was a ray of hope with a US produced Doctor Who movie.  The movie itself, featured Paul McGann as a rather like-able Doctor.  The show had some beautiful sets and an excellent performance by Eric Roberts as the Master, but the show's publicity was lackluster and the story dragged quite a bit.  It seemed to only appeal to a few Doctor-Who-starved fans.

When it returned in 2006 with Christopher Eccleston, I assumed it might last a season, if that.  I figured it will either be so removed from the original that it will annoy fans of the classic Doctor Who (like the new Star Trek movies), or it just would not have enough promotion and it would die like the McGann movie did.  

In an amazing turn this new Doctor Who (and BBC America) brought the show to the main stream.  It also helped to re-ignite a lot of intelligent science fiction again.  It's not completely uncommon for Americans to know what a Dalek is now.  Torchwood spin off even made Doctor Who sexy (who knew).


 The Doctor is now even in music videos!  Talk about making it into pop-culture!

Here we are almost 40 years after my first viewing experience and more than 50 years since the first episode.  It's come a LONG way.

I still find it gratifying that my favorite shows growing up were Star Trek, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica.  My favorite movie was Star Wars.  I guess I picked ones that would last.

Signs of Life?

"As a NASA spacecraft approaches a dwarf planet in our solar system, Ceres, scientists are stumped by what appear to be two bright lights shining from its surface."


This is interesting. It's probably nothing, but it opens the question (in my mind anyway), of what if we did find a sign of life. 

 How hard would we work to dismiss it? 

 We can say it's probably this or that, but truthfully, at this distance, we really cannot say for sure.

What would it take?

A discussion with scifi author Hal Rappaport about modern day equivalents to Orwell's 1984 predictions

A discussion with scifi author @HalRappaport about modern day equivalents to Orwell's 1984 predictions. http://t.co/qboNOAiJ33

— Big Picture Science (@BiPiSci) August 6, 2014

Iwasgonnamakeespresso

I love them! RT“@kibooki: #Iwasgonnamakeespresso pic.twitter.com/9Zcxf4GCQ7” @ALargeEvilCorp

— Mel Brooks (@MelBrooks) October 29, 2014

What Stephen King Taught Me About Writing

Thanks to Glenn Leibowitz for assembling these.


All of the below work is quotes from Stephen King:

On word choice
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.

Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.

The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?

On grammar

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren’t going to come and take you away.

Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that’s nice. The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful — at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing.

Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn’t they?
On reading

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books — of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone’s favorite, the john. You can even read while you’re driving, thanks to the audiobook revolution.

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

On writing

By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. As with physical exercise, it would be best to set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day.

With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met. Get busy putting those thousand words on paper... In an early interview (this was to promote Carrie, I think), a radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply — “One word at a time” — seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t.

In the end, it’s always that simple. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like The Lord of the Rings, the work is always accomplished one word at a time.
On what to write about

Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth.

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do. If you’re a plumber who enjoys science fiction, you might well consider a novel about a plumber aboard a starship or on an alien planet. Sound ludicrous? The late Clifford D. Simak wrote a novel called Cosmic Engineers which is close to just that. And it’s a terrific read.

John Grisham, of course, knows lawyers. What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.

To My Faithful Readers

To My Faithful Readers,

As many of you know, I became a dad this year to two beautiful little girls. 

As a result, the sequel to “Hath No Fury:” “Moments of Rhythm and Magic” will be delayed a little further into 2015.

To carry you until then here is another VERY rough excerpt from “Moments of Rhythm and Magic”:

DRAFT----

Even before going to the house he shared with his Grandmother, he stopped by Amy's house.  He was pretty certain that the Sellers family had moved when he tried calling Amy from Christie's house all those months ago.  Still, he had to try.  He found it dark and empty.  An aging "Century 21" sign stood outside. 

"Sorry man,"  Danny said.

"It's ok," Mark said.  Although he didn't feel ok.  He felt an incredible need to be in his old home. 

As he walked over he glanced at the old meeting place he and Amy had, the little hollow in the bushes.  It was where they had met countless times before their adventures.  He had  expected to see it overgrown, or worse, to see the bushes around it dying.  What he did see surprised him.  In the hollow now grew a bush with peach colored roses.  They were breathtakingly beautiful as they bloomed in the spring warmth. 

He loves you.

Mark had to work hard to hold back the flood of feelings that threatened to overwhelm him.  Determined to find something...some peace.  He soldiered on to his own house, Danny in tow.

He found his grandmother’s house to be empty and boarded up.  Some of the exterior looked "blackened."  It appeared as though someone wanted to burn it, but either didn't know how, or was afraid to get close enough to do it properly.  Graffiti had already begun to show up in spray-painted words of “all of them witches!”  Mark wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t think these deeds were done by child pranksters, not in this neighborhood, but by someone older, who should know better.

Danny had offered to help him break in, but Mark still surprisingly had his key, which worked the door lock and deadbolt.

Mark reflexively called for Natasha, who, of course, didn’t come.  The hint of incense still permeated the air, and for an instant, Mark found it comforting.  Warm memories of his grandmother and rituals filled his mind.  For an instant, he felt at home. It felt good, but somehow empty.

As they walked through the entry way they found the incense smell was was mixed with a musty smell and something really foul and rancid underneath.

The police in Kingston weren't the fastest operating, and this place was still a crime scene five months later.  It would not have given Mark comfort to know that his grandmother had already been dead before the grizzly events of that Halloween evening had occurred. His grandmother's body had been removed, but because it was still and active crime scene it had not been cleaned up yet.

Danny walked into the living room first, and, before Mark had a chance to see the room Danny threw him back.

“What the hell are you doing?!”  Mark yelled, genuine surprise and anger in his voice.

“Mark, man, you don’t want to go in there?”  Danny said holding Mark in something of a bear hug.

“Yes I do!”  Mark protested.

“No man,” Danny insisted.  “...you don’t!”

---See you in 2015