I’m nostalgic, but I don’t glorify the past. A friend of mine lost his house and almost everything he had in the Thomas fire in Ventura, CA. That got me to doing a photo inventory of every thing I own. And I mean everything including the box of tooth picks in the kitchen drawer. Part […]
My critique partner pointed out a plot hole that my Beta Reader found and I haven’t fixed yet. That’s not a good way to write a Steampunk book. She also found another plot hole I missed. It is not easy to fix plot holes. It takes work and time. I did not come up with […]
Time; you can’t buy it, you can only measure it, use it, or waste it. You can write a Steampunk book. You can write a good science fiction book. But it’s going to take time. Lots and lots of time. You can crave out time to write. It’s not easy. The experts say to give […]
Does your character need a character arc? Think about it. Did Sherlock Holmes change after each investigation? No, he was and always will be Sherlock Holmes. Did Bilbo Baggins change at the end of the Hobbit? No, when he got home he wanted to be a hobbit. He did not want to go adventuring again. […]
It’s Thursday. The wind is off the ocean and blows into the garage where I am working. A cold, bitter wind. I had a deadline due on Friday for a electronic project. I was pushing it. I had been pushing it for days and things kept coming up to delay the project. At 3:40 the […]
It happened again. A friend had a thumb drive die. Of course it contained the only copy of a file that he needed. Thumb drives are good, useful, even necessary, but they will fail just like hard drives. Always back up your files on two or more thumb drives. And keep the drives away from […]
A smith is a person that makes things using a hammer and fire. A silver smith takes a lump of silver and using a hammer, and heating the lump when it needs softening, to make things out of silver. A silver worker is all the others that make things out of silver like jewelers, silver-caster […]
I apologize for the last couple of post being late. My main computer died. Hard. I got the new blue screen of death with the frowny face. The computer tech had to wipe the computer and re-install windows. Decades of work has to be re-installed. I did not lose much except playlists for music and […]
I’ve read too many stories lately about steampunk inventors that have no life, social or otherwise, are independently wealthy, and live in a vacuum (or on an island in the middle of the ocean). An inventor does not have the time to mine, smelt, cast and then form his own copper wire for his high […]
On new year’s day there was a comic that said that it was the first of 52 Mondays. Something set off an alarm in the back of my mind. I went to the calendar and counted. Yes, there are 53 Mondays this year. The good news is that two of those Mondays are holidays, the […]