Seems to be a wave of bloggers taking this “Aspie” quiz. OK, I noticed a couple of people whose blogs I visit regularly have posted their results, so I thought I would take the test and do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night “The Shaper’s Daughter” (SD) came back from my friend Tracy (thank you Tracy!) who has been doing a copy edit of it. This means that SD will be going through its final draft during the next few days and I will be submitting it for publication thereafter. Needless to say I am rather excited by prospect.
I ended up going over Tracy’s edits late last night (when I should have been going to bed) and while there are a lot of red marks, she didn’t find any major defects. Now I get to see if the story is good enough for one of the magazines…

I’m in the process of trying to get a hold of friends in southern California. Hope everyone out there is OK. If anyone knows anything about Alex P., Michael C., Liz M., Mike D., Peter F., or Sivan D. (all originally LASFS friends) please drop me a line. (It is possible that Roger J., but I lost track of him in Las Vegas, so I don’t know if he is in the area or not.) Read the rest of this entry »

Combining at least three great things in one (coffee, science fiction, art): Heterodyne Spark Roast Coffee

I particularly like the Art Nouveau styling à la Alfons Mucha.

I’ve been doing a bit of surfing for writing related items and here are some of the more interesting links that I have come across: Read the rest of this entry »

The Scarlet Pimpernel, who is one of my favorite characters of all time and one of the inspirations for the Night Whippoorwill, is the Wiki Page of the Day:

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A list of various things that I have been up to recently and/or are currently engaged in (in no particular order):

• I started reading Charles Stross’ Halting State and have been enjoying it.
• Turned “The Shaper’s Daughter” over to a friend for copy editing while I work on researching markets.
• Finishing up the new scene to begin “The Alchemist of Liberty”.
• Built a double loft (basically from scratch) for Merideth over the weekend.
• Porting a bunch of my old wiki articles to the new wiki.
• Started watching Torchwood. Three episodes and liking it a lot.
• Researching a PHP based bookmark tool to add to fritzfreiheit.com
• and someone at UofM has developed a new plastic that is as strong as steel and transparent.

Recently there has been some discussion in the AAAWG about “show rather than tell”. This, in addition to some suggestions about letting the reader get to know the character a bit more before plunging them into the action led me to transform an early paragraph of exposition in “The Shaper’s Daughter” into a dialog scene.
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I got on a reading recommendations jag and it all started with Cosma’s Notebooks (a cool web site which I hesitate to call a blog — oh, OK, I will — is a personal blog about science, book, computation, etc geeks)…

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I’ve been trawling over my “Shaper’s Daughter” manuscript for the last three days on the Great ‘That’ Hunt. “The Shaper’s Daughter” is a bit under 15K words and about 200 of them were the word ‘that’. After the Hunt a mere 93 remain.