…Con. That’s where we’ll be heading in a few hours – Marscon, in lovely Williamsburg VA, to rub shoulders with science fiction authors, artists, and fans all weekend, and hopefully have a little fun and a bit of an escape from all that work. So, don’t go looking for me. Don’t worry, I’ll say hello […]

I don’t really have anything of particular note to report. That is, other than my compulsion to continue to add new prose to this space at least every few days. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been busy. It’s just that I’ve been busy with things like work and family and NaNoWriMo and reading […]

if this post feels a little disjointed, it’s because I feel a little disjointed right now. There’s lots of stressful and often unpleasant stuff rattling around in the deep dark corners of my brain right now, and it’s got me both totally on edge and wallowing in what may not necessarily a deep well of […]

Just some stuff rattling around in my head; with only a few re-runs from the twitter feed: ♦ – As strange as it sounds, I am coming to believe that LEGO Rock Band is a better game than Rock Band 2. ♦ – My new favorite Southern Colloquial expression is definitely “getting down to the […]

Jo Walton over at tor dot com touches on a phenomenon that I’m sure a lot of us have experienced over the years in her piece about “The Suck Fairy”: that little fey beastie who invades our bookshelves, making certain books we loved when we first read them, well, “suck,” when we pick them up […]

…Because the most horrific consequence imaginable of underfunded public education would be that kids start reading comic books. I’m really tired of people perpetuating insulting myths about my hobbies, especially when those people are Democratic political candidates like Nancy King (running for the MD state senate), whose positions I tend to agree with, especially on […]

According to yet another reported survey, romantic comedy films mess up people’s relationships (Sorry for the blinky over-advertised link destination) by encouraging unrealistic expectations about what “love” is supposed to be. For some people, this causes much distress when their real-life relationships don’t live up to the storybook perfection presented on the page or the […]

Last year (YiB 2009, #5), I went against my better judgment and read Twilight to see what all the fuss was about. Based on what I’d gleaned from the pop culture currents, I was pretty sure it wasn’t something that was going to appeal to me. And, I was basically right. For many reasons, I […]

I’ll just let the original words speak for me here (and if you don’t know from whence these words come, get thee to a library or bookshoppe immediately): A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it […]

Tuesday evening, after a work day that was stressful for all kinds of reasons that had little to do with the actual job at hand (though the triggering event came upon me too quickly to get nervous about), I shook off the resulting adrenaline rush with a few hours of literary shoulder-rubbing and political commentary […]