Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 5)

I recently started reading Amanda Foreman’s book A World on Fire. The sub-title is “Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War,” and the first section of the book is introducing the major players and setting the scene.

I’m only about fifty or sixty pages in, out of eight hundred, but there was one theme that jumped out at me, and that was the passion, anger, and vitriol evident between the two parties in Congress. It reminded me very much of what we’re seeing most days in the news, although I don’t think we’ve quite reached the stage where in 1859 a Virginia newspaper put a $50,000 reward on the head of William Seward for allegedly inspiring and instigating John Brown’s raid.

Foreman goes on to relate how the atmosphere in Washington grew poisonous as Southerners sought to implicate leading Republicans in the supposed conspiracy behind the raid. Again, change some names and events and you could be in 2023 rather than 1859.

I hear a lot of talk about how in the 80’s and 90’s the House, the Senate and the President worked together for the good of the nation. Did they really? A few years after I moved to the US, came the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. I don’t recall much togetherness. So I guess the real question is were those supposed halcyon days of the 80’s and 90’s the norm, or is normal the combative nastiness we see today, and that Foreman describes?

All of which reinforces an opinion my father first expressed many years ago. He declared a soft spot for all politicians, regardless of allegiance. It’s a deep peat bog in the English Peak District. There are many to be found in New England and around the Great Lakes.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about some places we’d visited and trying to pinpoint when we’d been there. I threw out a date that sounded right, and she shook her head. No, she said. We went before COVID!

And that made me pause for a moment.

I’ve read a lot of articles and commentary on how COVID was a defining period for many people, and hadn’t really made the connection myself until then, and I wondered why.

The answer, as I see it depends on how the COVID pandemic affected you. We were incredibly fortunate in a combination of working from home and living in a semi-rural area, we were shielded from many of the issues people faced in more urban settings, especially with regard to lockdowns.

I think because we didn’t have the huge dislocation many people went through, COVID wasn’t such a defining period for us, until we looked beyond a daily, or weekly focus and considered longer timeframes. So while it took me a while to catch up with the rest of the world, I’m definitely more aware now of pre and post COVID timelines.

Life rolls happen when you least expect them.

Or, rather they do in my case. And when they happen they consume everything you have to the exclusion of everything else. I had one of those in July when I received photo from the manager of our rental property showing a hole in the kitchen ceiling. Somewhere else in the building, someone’s AC unit had popped a pipe and distributed water everywhere.

That meant an unplanned visit, and even though the building management made the repairs, we still had to coordinate the repairs, the painter, and clean up – as well as continuing the day job.

Needless to say, something had to suffer, and it was my writing. July recorded the lowest monthly word count since I started keeping track, and I’m now about 20,000 words behind where I was at this time last year.

Until last night, I’d written barely anything in August either, but I did manage to jot down some thoughts and ideas on Death at a Wedding, that today went into the story. It wasn’t as many words as I hoped but at least I climbed back onto the wagon, and it feels pretty good so far.

I need to adjust my plans for the rest of the third quarter, but hopefully it will work out. And hopefully no more life rolls!

It seems a little hard to believe that not only are we finished with the first half of 2022, but as I write this, we’re already a third of the way through July!

Before I look at the first six months, I want to point everyone to the James Webb Space Telescope site here The image includes the star HD147980, and a number of other stars, recognizable by the diffraction spikes. Every other object in the image is a galaxy! It’s a sobering reminder of the scale of the universe, and how miniscule we humans are by comparison.

Turning back to the more mundane, the year began well, both from a writing and publishing perspective. As I’ve mentioned previously I published four collections, and separately submitted several stories. Unfortunately, progress on the next Jacob and Miriam novel has been moving slowly, and I think some of that frustration led to pretty much a writing halt in June. I did finish a couple of short stories, but it was an effort.

July began pretty much the same as June, and over this weekend, I sat down and gave some thought as to why. Blaming it on critical voice is an easy, and not very satisfactory answer. The real question is what caused me to let critical voice seize control like that? I have some ideas about that, and some of it goes back to the decisions I made around writing goals for 2022 back a tthe turn of the year. My next step is to revisit, and maybe revise those goals for the second half.

I’ll keep you posted.

If memory serves correctly, it was April of last year when I mentioned the Obsidian application on this blog, and I’ve spent a year or so putting notes and references into the application, but not really using it as a knowledge management tool.
That started to change about a month ago, and really gained momentum in this past week.
During May I came across a post on the Obsidian forums from Nick Milo. Amongst many other things, Nick has a website called Linking Your Thinking, along with templates and classes to help you organize your personal information. I downloaded the latest LYT toolkit, and worked through the notes and some of the You Tube tutorials.
In the same way I had that Zettelkasten epiphany last year, I finally found a structure that works for me. There are some differences from the base LYT toolkit, but I began to see how I could use Maps of Content to pull data from all over the repository and show it in one place. Explaining the overall structure is outside the scope of this post, and the Linking Your Thinking site explains it much better 🙂
What is in scope for this post is the feedback I got from a short story I wrote about a year ago. The story is called A Roll of the Dice, and tells of the experiences of British soldiers serving with Simon Bolivar’s army to liberate South America from Spanish rule. The feedback was that an incident in the story was not believable and would never have happened.
But it did happen.
I used the actual events as the jumping off point for the story, and went to prove it. Nothing came up in the research books on my bookshelves, and that left me scratching my head. Where had I read about it? A day or so later as I was flicking through my kindle, I found two titles about the wars of liberation in South America. Buried in one of them was the reference I needed.
And then my mind did its own linking magic.
I’ve already catalogued a lot of reference articles in Obsidian for both South American and the Exiles in Babylon. It made sense to extend that catalog to all relevant publications on my bookshelves, in kindle, and Apple Books.
And I’ve linked the book reference to a note on the short story, so next time I can get to it immediately.
Well, that’s the plan!

I was in the grocery store earlier this week, working through the list of things we needed, when I realized the list also had several items we already have, but wanted to make sure we had enough.
That made me ask the question of myself – what is enough?
The answer, as usual, it depends.
In the time before the covid pandemic, I’d have a couple of cans of sweet corn in the pantry, and the same for peas and black beans, or packets of rice. Now I have five or six of each, plus several packs of chicken and other meat stored in the freezer.
All of this extra stock was driven by the inability to buy those items. We went for a period of maybe six weeks where finding chicken in our stores was impossible. Similarly with peas and sweet corn.
For the past month it’s been eggs.
I hear the refrain about supply-chain issues, but if the manufacturer can supply peas with onions, peas with mushrooms, or peas with jalapenos, why can’t they provide peas with more peas?
It’s not just foodstuffs or paper goods. We’ve seen empty shelves of laundry detergent, dryer sheets, and air fresheners.
As a result, my shopping patterns have changed.
I’m more aware of what’s not on the shelves, or available in the produce section. If it’s an item I use regularly, I make sure I have a good supply in the pantry. Not so easy with fresh fruit of vegetables, but I’ve learned the earlier you get to the store, the more likely you are to find broccoli, or peppers or onions.
I’m hopping these supply-chain “issues” resolve themselves, and my patterns change again, but to be honest, I’m not confident.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted here, and it’s been quite a busy time.

On the writing front, I’ve completed several short stories that made their way into a spy fantasy collection titled The Vatican Shadows. In addition, I went through all the short stories I’ve written in the past year or so and added two more collections: Making a New Start and Mageweaver.

Making a New Start is a series of stories about Nidintu, one of my Babylon characters, who kept hanging around until I wrote about him.

Mageweaver came about after a conversation with my sister, Margaret, about weaving, and she was kind enough to license the image of one of her latest creations as the cover. Margaret is currently deep in preparation for the latest iteration of Heallreaf, a tapestry exhibition that she conceived, created, and is now in its fourth iteration.

All of these are available in digital and paperback at most stores, or directly from this website in digital only.

Stay tuned as there are two more collections coming from that backlog review, and potentially, a third.

I’ve been very fortunate over the years not to have a home or computer event that causes me to lose hard or digital copies of stories or other data I keep on my computers. Dean Wesley Smith tells of how he had a fire in his apartment and lost a novel and uncounted short stories. If I recall correctly, this was back in the 1980’s, so there were no computer backups.

Everything was typed manually, and stored in hard copy.

I have some of my stories in hard copy, but not all of them, and I see that as an option I’ll get to in the fullness of time. I often pride myself with the fact I have three or four thumb drives and a 4 Terabyte external drive where I keep regular backups of all my writing and other data. At less than $20 for a 64 Gigabyte thumb drive, cycling several into the backup process is pretty straightforward.

I was thinking about this one morning last week, reminding myself it was almost two weeks since I’d copied everything to a backup drive. Which was when I started thinking about the location of my computer, and those backup drives.

The computer, obviously, is on the desk in my office. The 4 Terabyte drive is on the right-hand drawer. Two of the thumb drives are tucked into the front pocket of my organizer, and the third is lying on the desk beside the laptop

Which means, if we have a fire, or a tornado rips through, everything is in the same place and those backups won’t help me one bit. Yes, I do have Dropbox, but mostly for current work in progress only. If everything goes sideways, that won’t help, and neither will the fact all my backups are within three feet of the computer itself!

So, the first thing I did was relocate one of the thumb drives into my bedside cabinet. The second was to make use of the one Terabyte of Cloud storage I get with my Office 365 subscription. It’s not ideal, but it’s a start.

Where are your backups?

Last weekend (March 13/14), the clocks moved forward here in the US. In past years this has been one of those almost non-events. The clocks change and we get on with our lives.

For some reason, this year has been different. I did wonder if it might be linked to my trip to England, arriving back the week before the time change, but decided it wasn’t the reason. England to the United States is the easy trip. It’s effectively a long long day which sends me to bed completely exhausted, and after a good night’s sleep, my body clock is back to normal.

This past week though has been a struggle. Every morning it’s like climbing out of a fog. While effectively I’ve been waking an hour earlier than I’m used to, this hasn’t translated to any being ready for bed any earlier in the evening.

I’m sure there’s a scientific study somewhere that explains what happens. This morning I woke up and from the light and how I felt, I knew the time without having to look at the clock.

That’s back to normal for me.

Now to get everything else in my life aligned. But that’s a story for another time!