Category: Blog

These are the straight up, blog type posts. Little of this, little of that

The Automat

Have you ever gotten nostalgic for something you’ve never actually experienced? For me, one of those things is automats. Whenever I saw them in old movies, they fascinated me. The thought of all those different kinds of food behind those little doors, ranked behind those panes of glass just seemed so damned cool. I dig them so much that I actually put a super high tech one in Ghost Light Burn. Just because I could.

[envira-gallery id=”1218″]

Ghost Light Burn: Coming Soon!

With all that’s been going on in the world, I have been understandably distracted. And as such, I forgot to share the good news that the latest installment of the Maverick Heart Cycle will be coming your way next year from Renaissance Press. It’s been a hard year, and it sure feels great to know that the adventures of Keene, Lexa-Blue, Ember and Vrick will continue a while longer!

“You’re on the Global Frequency.”

Global Frequency is a killer limited series written by Warren Ellis, with each issue drawn by a different artist. Miranda Zero runs a shadowy organization of people with special talents. Each has a super high tech phone and if it rings, they will be greeted with “You’re on the Global Frequency” and there will be some threat that must be stopped. And the receiver of that phone call has the special skills needed to deal with it.

The only regular characters are Zero herself and her operator, Aleph, who contacts the various recruits and coordinates the organization’s efforts. As such, you never know what, if any of the other characters are going to make it to the end of the story, which makes for a gripping read. Having a different artist on each issue keeps the look, feel, and mood of the stories fresh with each story, and Ellis crafts a series of exciting technothrillers about cutting edge threats.

I highly recommend this series. It’s intense and can get dark and violent at times, but it’s an enthralling read. There was even a pilot made back in 2005, starring Michelle Forbes as Miranda Zero (which may have been one of the most inspired casting choices ever!) but, alas, it was never picked up.

Learn more about this excellent series:
Wikipedia
Goodreads

Overture (Part Three of Three)

Galactum Year 143

*Where did you find this guy? He’s a complete nil.* She was using the node far more easily now, and though it, ey could tell that the thought of having a bioware link to Know-It-All embedded in her brain no longer made her skin crawl. Still, it made it easier for them to communicate until ey decided the time was right to reveal es true nature.

*Now, now, Meat. You weren’t much better yourself the first time you walked through that hatch. Give him a chance.*

The subject of their scrutiny, completely unaware of their opinions of his skills and personality, lay on the deck, his torso and head buried deep in the access panel. Continue reading “Overture (Part Three of Three)”

All Touch and No Contact

We weren’t huggers when I was a child. I have a very specific memory that my mind has labelled as the first time I was hugged, though I don’t know if my recollections can be trusted on this issue. It was in high school, by a friend, and I can’t have gone that long. Can I?

My parents were born in England in the early part of the 20th century. They were lovely people and I miss them deeply. However, my dad was not an overly sentimental man. He had little time or patience for overly emotional gestures, and was deeply interested in social justice and fairness. He was also fair and expected us to do the best we could, pushing when we needed it, but not blaming us for our failures. My mother, I think, was the more emotional one of the two, though I think she pushed it down and maintained a reserve she didn’t necessarily feel to stay in line with my father’s natural reticence.

I remember being fed, clothed and cared for. I remember we laughed a lot and our home was always open to friends and even strangers who needed a refuge or a meal or just a place to spend a holiday. My parents knew what it meant to come to a new country and start over, and they never forgot the kindnesses that others had given them. We often had other newcomers in our home for Christmas.
But I don’t remember hugs. Continue reading “All Touch and No Contact”

Home

“When I think of home
I think of a place
where there’s love overflowing”

Sorry to have gone MIA for the last few weeks, but there has been a lot going on since I blogged last, and much of it has to do with home. The idea of home. The reality of home.

Like so many other people, I am not a native Torontonian. In fact, I used to joke that it always shocked me when I met someone who actually WAS from here. I’m from Saskatchewan originally, and lived there for thirty five years before I moved to Toronto. Because I lived there for so long, most of my remaining family is there, as well as many of my dearest friends. I like to go home every year to see everyone and spend time seeing people who have been in my life, if not for the whole span, then for decades, going back as far as high school.

And that’s where the duality comes in. We need words for “the home where I live” and “the home I come from.” I wonder if other languages make this linguistic distinction. Continue reading “Home”

Coming Out Aro

I’m attracted to men. I have been as long as I can remember, even back before my body was even capable of attraction. When I was a child, I identified with the female characters much more than the men, mostly because they got to be close to all the men I admired most, whose attention I craved. It wasn’t that I felt that I was anything other than male myself, it was that, somehow, I believed that identifying with those women was the way to get closer to those beautiful men.

As soon as there were words to describe my desires, I knew their truth, even if it took years to accept them and truly claim them as my own. It was the Seventies and those words were only just being spoken openly, and only in larger, more cosmopolitan places than my home town. Well, the words were spoken, but only as weapons, with no other intention than to draw blood. But, I knew who I was. And when the opportunity came to act on it, I did. And eventually, I even came to accept it and speak it proudly. Continue reading “Coming Out Aro”

Worldbuilding and Story (Part Three of Three)

So, you’ve built a world. You might not know all the details yet, but you have the basics down, and have begun to answer the questions of why the story is taking place when and where it does. Now, you have to get down to telling the story, putting together the elements that make up your narrative structure.

People often ask about the how of writing, the nuts and bolts of the process of coming up with an idea and following it through to a final form, be it short story, novel, essay, or memoir. But the thing is, ask a dozen writers and you’ll get a dozen answers, all different and all specific to writer and the genre and the stage of that writer’s career. So, I figured I’d throw my two cents, or my three ideas, into the ring along with all the others

I’ve talked in previous posts about how I’ve arrived at specific ideas or decisions in my own writing, even talked about the process of world-building. Where world-building is more about creating the back drop for the story, and the conditions where it can occur, this is more about the story telling process, the business of creating a plot and crafting a narrative that makes use of the world you’ve built. Continue reading “Worldbuilding and Story (Part Three of Three)”

Worldbuilding Basics (Part Two of Three)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I tend to think of the world building process as Decision>Question>Implication. You come up with your premise and begin asking questions about what the premise requires your world to contain, then you explore the ramifications of the choices you’ve made and the questions you’ve asked.

It’s important to remember that world building choices extend in all directions. And what I mean by this is that they come from somewhere, they affect the world and characters in the present and they drive the story forward in specific ways. Once you’ve made a decision as to where your story idea springs from, be it a character, situation, or some other detail that inspires you to write the story down, then the process of building the world begins.

Let’s take a basic, fairly simple idea and start from there: a child has wings. Continue reading “Worldbuilding Basics (Part Two of Three)”