Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Page 5 of 14

Road Trip

June 24, 2024 /

Last week I made a business trip to visit a client in Seattle.

No big thing, you’d think. A direct flight from Atlanta into Seattle and back again with hotel and meetings in between.

There was a time when I made a trip like this two or three times a month – sometimes leaving on Sunday and not getting home until late Friday. It’s a pretty rootless existence but you get used to it – the packing, assessing who in the terminal you don’t want as your seat mate, and consoling with other travelers when the inevitable flight delays occur.

I mention this because last week was the first business trip I’ve taken since 2019, and packing for business is very different from packing for vacation. In some senses, business packing is easier. Even with business casual there’s a more limited set of clothes to pack, and unlike vacation where I pack three or four times as many books as I can reasonably read, I cut right back for business trips. However, let’s not forget the Kindle, Apple, and Kobo libraries on my iPad, so maybe I’m not cutting back as much as I thought.

I had some issues with my boarding pass not showing my Pre-Check status on the outbound leg, but overall it couldn’t have gone much better. The flights were on time, the Seattle weather was unexpectedly clear, dry, and warm, and the client was a pleasure to work with.

Overall this was a good re-introduction to traveling for business. I know it won’t always be like this. On-time flights, an aisle seat both ways, and writing over two thousand words in my downtime is a win I’m happy to take.

Thrill Ride – Gadgets

June 10, 2024 /

If you didn’t support the kickstarter for Thrill Ride, the latest issue Gadgets, is arriving on June 21st. I don’t have anything in this issue, but I’ve seen some of the stories and it’s another great anthology.

I can’t tell you to hurry before all copies are gone, because it’s an eBook! However you can get it here where you can avoid the rush: Thrill Ride.

You’ll be glad you did.

Heallreaf 5 is Here

June 3, 2024 /

I’ve written before about my sister, Margaret, and what a talented weaver she is.

As well as winning many awards, and allowing me to use her work The Alchemist’s Dream as the cover for my book Mageweaver, Margaret is also the driving force behind the conception and continued success of the Heallreaf exhibitions.

Heallreaf started as a small affair at West Dean College in 2015 and has grown each time to Heallreaf 5 with showings in three locations in the UK starting on June 29th at Weston Park in Shropshire. I won’t make it to the Weston Park location, but I am looking at one of the other two – Morley Gallery in London in December 2024 or Farfield Mill in Cumbria from January to April 2025.

Morley Gallery will be easier for me from a travel perspective, but Farfield Mill is just a stone’s throw from the English Lake District. The Lakes have some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and it’s a very, very long time since I’ve seen them so that may be the tie-breaker.

If you get the chance, take the time to visit Heallreaf 5 and the creations of some of the best weaver’s working today. You won’t be disappointed.

So Bad It’s Compelling

May 28, 2024 /

Have you ever sat down to watch a TV show or movie, or picked up a book, and in the first few minutes said: this is terrible, but you persist anyway?

This happened to me recently. I was surfing the dozens of channels on my subscription and complaining about how there was nothing to watch.
Not quite true, but I’ve never been into a dozen home shopping channels or following the exploits of housewives in this week’s target city. It was also that time of the evening when movies I might be interested in are well under way, and my cable provider is very unpredictable on which shows get the restart option.

I never thought I’d say it out loud, but there are times when I miss Comcast and Xfinity. Anyway, after the third cycle through the channel guide, I settled on a movie called Trailer Park Shark which was just starting.

Yes, you did read that correctly, and a couple of minutes in, it was about what I expected. “This is awful,” I said more than once. Despite that, an hour later, I was still watching. I may even watch the movie again because there must have been something in the way the story was told that kept me in front of the screen.

I’m sure there’s a learning opportunity there, and techniques I can use in my own writing once I figure them out.

Tentative Steps into AI

May 20, 2024 /

A few weeks ago I mentioned starting a new project and the first night nerves associated with that experience.

The nerves have mostly settled down now, but spiked a little when I had a new application make its appearance on my desktop this week. Microsoft Co-Pilot!

To say there’s a huge amount of noise around AI, and how it will impact our lives in all areas is likely an equally huge understatement. I am not anti-AI, I just haven’t prioritized the time to really dive in and understand the implications.

I’m the type of person who learns best by doing something rather than reading about it, so I tend to prioritize time when I have something specific for that application. I didn’t think I’d reached that point with AI until I had to review several meeting recordings relevant to the projects I’m working on.

Each meeting was about an hour long and it promised to take me nearly two days to go through all of them. And then a colleague suggested using Co-Pilot. It took a while to work out how to use the interface, and request a summary of the first meeting.

There was a slight delay – maybe ten seconds – before a window popped up with a half-page of text that not only outlined the discussion, but also highlighted the action items. I listened to the first meeting all the way through and didn’t find anything Co-Pilot had missed. After that, it took less than an hour to get summaries of the other meetings.

I’m still not sure about AI and fiction writing, but I am very sure that if an application of AI saves me nearly two days of listening to meetings I didn’t attend, then sign me up for more!

About Labyrinths

May 13, 2024 /

I first learned about labyrinths when I lived in San Francisco, and walked the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral. It was a difficult time in my life, and the slow measured pace as you wend and weave along the paths to the center was calming, and helped put some issues into perspective.

After I moved back to the east coast, I lost the habit of labyrinth walking until this past weekend. I’m not sure what motivated me to do a search, but I found an outdoor labyrinth here in Auburn at Village Christian Church, and decided to pay a visit.

Around ten on a Saturday morning, I was the only person walking through the trees to the clearing where the labyrinth is constructed. Stone walkways lined with brick to mark the way. It was surprisingly quiet given the busy road on one side and housing on the other side. I cleared my mind and decided to focus on one thought as I walked – something never easy for me at the best of times.

It worked, in a way, and for the first few minutes, I found myself having to forcibly slow done. None of the quick walk I usually have when going from one place to another. For me getting the most from the labyrinth experience is a slow measured pace with just the birdsong, the soft rustle of leaves in the light wind, and the occasional bark of a dog.

On the return circuit back to the entrance. I realized the sun dappled patches of light and shade were very much like our lives. We cycle from the good times in the sun to the darker times in the shade, and then back again. In my own life I’m feeling that transition from a dark time to good.

It’s wonderful to feel the sun again.

First Person or Third Person

May 6, 2024 /

Toward the end of last week, I finished the latest Jacob and Miriam novel. This is the fastest I’ve written a novel, but not the reason for this post.

I write the Jacob and Miriam novels in the third person, and the Jacob short stories in the first person. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write that way, it just happened.

Once the novel was done, I put it aside and turned my attention to a short story – at least I think it’s a short story. It may turn out longer. It’s a Jacob story that came about from a throwaway line in the story A Cousin’s Outing that appears in the Thrill Ride issue Sisters in Arms.

In that story, Miriam makes a comment about a past event, and Gideon makes it a condition of his help to hear the full story about the event.

At the time, I had no idea what that event was, how it came about, or who was involved.

Well, the subconscious mind is a strange thing, and over the weekend, I opened a new Scrivener document and started writing about that event. After about 400 words, I came to a slow stop. Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure what it was, so back to the top and reread from the beginning. As I did so, I found myself changing the viewpoint. With my head still deep in the novel, I automatically wrote Jacob in the third person. As I cycled back through the first paragraphs, I changed from third person to first, and then kept writing.

Because I started late in the day, I didn’t really expect to hit my daily word count, and was quite surprised when I looked up and had blown past it. I don’t think I would have been anywhere close had I persisted with Jacob in the third person. And I even have a title. Keep your eyes peeled for Unwelcome Competition!

First Night Nerves

April 30, 2024 /

This week, I started a new project. It was different from many others I’ve worked on over the past few years.

It isn’t the work, as that’s similar to many other projects I’ve worked on over the years. What is different is that this time, most of the people I’m working with are as new to me as I am to them. And being the new kid in town, is still a bit scary.

On one level, I know that in a couple of months, I will know have built relationships with the team, learned how the various systems work, where to find documentation and why we are using both Confluence and SharePoint, and the rules for putting documents in one or the other, or both!

I’ve done this many times before, and may well do it again in the future, so there’s no real fear there, It’s those usual first night nerves

An Empty Nest

April 22, 2024 /

Last month, I wrote a piece about the persistence of the birds who built a nest on the fan blades in our courtyard Ingenious Persistence – Richard Freeborn

We have watched the parents in their daily feeding cycles coming to and fro to the nest, and counted three chicks. We held our breath during a storm earlier this month, as it was a wild storm that led to the death of the chicks last year. This storm was nowhere near as bad and the chicks continued cheeping, chirping, and demanding more food.

At one point I thought we were down to two babies, and then this past weekend, they changed from scrawny spike-haired chicks too real birds. And there were four of them not three.

On Sunday morning we spotted one of them venturing out of the nest and onto the fan blade. There was a flurry of movement in our house as the cat and the dogs were bundled inside and all doors closed.

This was not a popular decision, especially with our cat, Roon, who despite closing in on 16 years still considers himself to be the rambunctious wild-child he was in his youth (don’t we all!).

Almost like that was a trigger, the first bird fluttered out of the nest and onto the ground. The others soon followed, settling on branches, guttering, or the top of the brick wall.

They spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes getting the feel for their wings, making practice flights across the courtyard, and from the gutter to the ridge line of the roof.

And then they were gone. Off into the line of trees that follow the creek behind the house, and indistinguishable from all the other birds flocking and foraging for the afternoon.

There was a feeling of disappointment that they were gone, but also a sense of wonder. Days and weeks of nurturing and in twenty minutes they are gone and off to a life of their own.

I wonder if there’s a lesson there for humans?

A Geek Moment

April 15, 2024 /

It has been many years since I wrote software code for a living, and maybe ten since I last dabbled.

The dabbling was building a database of stock and futures prices using Groovy and the lightweight H2 database. I had a fairly robust application and a good block of historical data when I ran into a couple of problems. The goal of the database was to calculate the relative strength of a stock or future against its peers, as described by Tom Dorsey in his book Point and Figure Charting. At that time, I couldn’t find a Groovy or Java application that allowed me to calculate the results I needed – bad planning on my part as I couldn’t get my head round how to write the code. The second problem was that H2 changed their database structure and for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to migrate.

As a result, the project just sat there with nothing happening. I’m still collecting the raw price data, but right now it sits in flat files on my hard drives and backups.

About three years ago, I dusted off my coding gloves and used Python to manipulate some health care data for a project I was working on. Now Python as I suspect most reading this know, is incredibly powerful and has a host of open source libraries available to the developer. One of those libraries matplotlib has a whole set of finance utilities. I looked at the library, and put my notes aside but the thought of it never really left my mind.

This past week, I pulled out the old Groovy scripts and looked at migrating them to Python. I rethought exactly what I had been looking to do that first time and scaled back a lot of the calculations that weren’t really necessary. The refactoring ended up being much easier than I expected. And fast. Over 200,000 rows into a SQLITE database in about five seconds!

I also found some interesting and illuminating thoughts in Jeremy Du Plessis’s book The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure. I still need to think through the calculation routines based on his writing, but I may not need matplotlib after all!

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Richard Freeborn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑