The Prometheans Demand Blood

“One more day of blood sacrifice,” Pierce chanted. One more day. Painted in congealed arterial spray and clotting fluids, with sweat streaking his jowls and plastering expensively styled hair to his skull, he shrieked the shibboleths and prayed that this be would the day. The day his god would reward his devotion by ending the...

Heads they win, tails we lose

Some thoughts on cancel culture First, let's get something out of the way: I'm on the "wrong" side of this. The conservative one, more or less, although if I call myself anything, I'd say I'm more like a constitutionalist libertarian. (Socially liberal/economically conservative, all that.) Politically, I'm a leave-me-the-hell-alone-ist. I want a government that's as...

Rounding up the mavericks

So I missed my usual post last Thursday. Looking at the blog stats, it's easy to tell; people don't visit when there's nothing to visit. As for why I missed it, that's a tale as old as time. And probably less interesting than watching paint dry. Boiling it down to the essence, a multitude of...

National Not-Novel Writing Month, day 15: A Robocraft story

I play only two video games: Minecraft and Robocraft. What I like about both of them is that they don't feel like video games to me. As a kid (and as an adult when my kids gave me a great excuse) I loved building awesome futuristic vehicles out of Legos and imagining them in combat....

National Not-Novel Writing Month, day 1: The Silent Kid

Apparently if you're doing the short-story-per-day challenge instead of NaNoWriMo, you're supposed to also post it on your blog. I hesitate to do this because it'll be painfully obvious if I fail to keep up, and also because I'm not sure I want everyone to see my first-draft stuff. But oh, well, what the hell....

A walk to the edge of the world

A few weeks ago, while reading about the Bog Bodies of Europe, the nucleus of a story flashed into my mind. It gave me goosebumps...partly because that's what happens when something fires up my imagination, and partly because the world in which I envision it has been waiting for me to write a story in...