Writing
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They Ask Me, Hank, Why Do You Drink
We play this fun game in our house where one of us gets sick, and we mutate the virus or bacteria or whatever and then pass it along to someone else. Round and round it goes, always changing, always re-infecting. It’s important for a family to have traditions. And,
Operation Bootstrap Subscribers
With the rise of ChatGPT and other pseudo-AIs that scrape the freely available content on the web to sell back to us, some authors have started moving their short stories and scratch writing behind a free paywall, which I guess is just a wall. 🧱 Anyway, I'm one of
Flashes From the Verse
Cynthia's Next Job
As she waited for him to climb the steps to the patio, she wondered how he had found her so quickly. But then a soft breeze coming in off the water carried the question away, and she felt comforted by the idea that he had been waiting for her, probably every day since she had dropped off the grid.
Drenched in Data
My favorite word I hear bandied about at work these days has to be "data lake." Such as "put that in the data lake" or "look at the size of that f-ing data lake!" The term didn't exist in 1997 when House
Writing
Breaking Down the Raven
One of the best things about Stephen King’s On Writing is the way he breaks down scenes and tells you how they were constructed. Being told not to use adverbs is great and all, but really getting into the mind of a good writer and seeing the process behind
Deleted Scenes
Brigham Plaza Lost Epilogue
The irony of the situation wasn't lost on Parker.
The Artifact
Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom—and warfare. Ray wondered if that’s all the artifact was—a little statue to be placed on a bookshelf in a fancy home office. Code drops in the Net often took the shape of such objects, but when touched, they were supposed
Troll, Pease...
There’s a new troll in town, and she’s not here to bring us another crappy podcast or build an automotive affront to god on 130. I’m not sure what she brings, but she smells really good, and in today’s crazy world, that’s all that really
Continuity
Misawa Air Base, Japan. 1994. Nick’s dad has a fancy 486 computer running Windows 3.11, and instead of watching a movie with my friends, I’m hunched over its sunken monitor trying to figure out why Lieutenant Commander Data keeps warning me about a continuity error. I can’
House of Nepenthe: Draft 1 Complete
Prompt: an exhausted Hispanic science fiction writer vaguely resembling literary heartthrob Daniel Verastiqui at his desk after he just finished the first draft of his new book titled House of Nepenthe. If you’re into numbers, the draft clocks in at 170,000+ words and 400+ pages. It took more
Jester West
In a dorm room on the thirteenth floor of Jester West, a homemade immersion rig was whirring in the relative quiet. To his roommates, X appeared to be resting on his bed, reclined as if sleeping. Under that rig, behind those eyes, an entire world was spinning just for him.