Month: June 2015

“You don’t have a Soul; you are a Soul. You have a Body.” CS Lewis

CreateSpace is now processing my final changes to “Echoes of Family Lost;” with luck and grace, it should be available this week.  So, what’s next?

“Henge’s Big Day!”  I’ve never written for children before.  Why not see what I’m capable of doing?  In an earlier post I mentioned the library at the school my two girls attend.  I’ve been a volunteer in said library for years… stacking, shelving, reorganizing.  I’ve had plenty of time to look at those books in the “E” section.  Easy?  Early Reader?  Don’t know nor care.  But I started paying attention to the format.

“HBD” will be about 10 x 10″ with a hardcover – if I can afford it.  I’d like to:  we withdraw softcover kids books after only two years of use, on average; they’re just too damaged.  Kids are natural entropy-bots; it’s one of the things that make them interesting.  I’d lost my point… so, about ten inches square (that’s blib quatloos for you on the metric system).  I thought about a story… I thought about Henge (pronounced “hen-geh”) the youngest of Machine Civilization and also something of a hybrid… although that explanation really doesn’t come out until late in “EFL.”  Even so, late in “T4L” Henge overhears a comment by Lily, and immediately applies it to herself.

On the one hand, MachCiv is all about so-called AI’s; on the second hand, I keep hammering away at their nature as people.  On the gripping hand, “T4L” is shot through with Lily’s re-discovered Christianity.  What if one of them looked at the evidence and wanted to become a Christian?

How do you baptize a string of code?  Throwing water onto a rack of servers would be a very bad idea.  But… the rest of the idea….

I cannot draw; once upon a time I could make 3D-parametric design software dance, sing, bring drinks and empty ashtrays.  Now…. Below the fold are some awful sketches from my 20-page “Henge’s Big Day!”  I wont say ‘don’t laugh,’ as I have, too!  I use it to try to let illustrators know what I’m looking for.  What’s sad is that I’ve gone looking for illustrators here and here and here, freely talking four figures of money, and after a month I have only a single, possible lead.  Is everyone so satisfied with their day-jobs?!  Is everyone so narcoleptized by the dole?  Why is finding an illustrator this difficult?  Twenty pages!  Little background!  Watercolors!

Sheesh.  It’s enough to drive a man to drink.  Let me get another Martini, then tell you about Book Four.  Now, that’s killing me.

Continue reading ““You don’t have a Soul; you are a Soul. You have a Body.” CS Lewis” →

If sharing is caring… is drinking like thinking?

I made a gift of a hardcopy of The Fourth Law to my girls’ primary school library.  After reading it, the Librarian asked me to come in and give a short (~20 minute) talk to the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders about creative writing and self-publishing.  Why not?

Attached is a pdf of the PowerPoint I was using.  It’s fairly sparse, but I use the slides more as a mnemonic device to keep me on track while talking.

The 6th Graders were fun:  not only did they ask many questions, there was the “that’s cool!” moment when they realized that Daughter #2, their classmate, is the T4L’s protagonist.  As I told them:  write what you know.

SFdSS Writing PP 2015

Once Upon A Time…

This is a new blog I’ve just created, to separate my own personal works from those of 3-AR Studios LLC.  That WordPress link is here.  My esteemed colleague, Will Deonne, has his own website, here.  It had been slowly but surely creeping me out over the last several posts that my personal content was the only thing going to a website that should feature the content of our combined efforts.  Admittedly, we’ve not done much together, recently, but that does not mean we shan’t ever again.

That led to this.  Will has an astonishing repertoire of written and drawn works, whereas I have – at this posting – only my first traditional novel.  The second is due out within days, I’ve an illustrator hopefully lined up for #3, and I’m starting work on #4 tonight, after I get this set up.

Having said all that to say this:  let’s have fun!