April

For those of you who may have had the glorious fortune of living most of your lives in warmer climes, let me tell you about the state of Michigan. The state of Michigan has only two seasons: SprummerFall and WINTER!, each lasting approx. six months.

I moved down to Nashville in the middle of July and everyday until about mid-September I thought that my blood was literally boiling in my arteries. It was so damn hot! And everybody kept telling me, "Oh, you'll get used to it," and I kept thinking they were full of crap. But you know what? They were right. Five years in I actually am used to it.

Publication is once again mine!

The fine chaps/chapettes over at decomP have seen fit to publish my flash piece, "The Devil's Courtyard". I am exceedingly proud at being allowed in such great company. You may notice that the story is reminiscent of Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, and that's because when I wrote this I was reading several books about the Belgian massacre of the Congo*, which if you may remember from high school english, is the subject of HOD. The story has some slightly strong language but should be otherwise safe for the faint of heart or your IT Department.

You can read the story here. And be sure to check out the other great pieces of fiction in this issue.


*Most notably the aforementioned HOD and well as Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which is hands-down one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read.

PSA for the day

I'm not usually one for making this blog political, but this open letter from Berkeley professor of public policy Michael O'Hare is simply too good to not pass on. While his argument is broad, and thus open to all sorts of nit picky responses, I feel the general message is sound. US citizens are faced with a variety of Godzilla-sized monsters which we are only capable of combating or corralling through an entity equally as large (or larger). That entity, our Voltron if you will, is government, like it or hate it. Government is the only voice (true or not) of the collective in this country, and "starving the beast" for the last 30 years has simply led to an America that has willingly handed the vast majority of our cultural, military, and social control to unmanageably large, government-sized corporations who have only one goal in mind...profit. Not social welfare, not the betterment of Man. Profit.

I'm all for correcting the excesses of government; as the sole representative for the people of the United States, our elected officials should be held to a higher standard. But the elimination of government, and the under-funding of its coffers, will stand as the greatest folly of this and future generations if we continue to accept this debacle as the truth. If the wealthiest nation that has ever existed on this planet is not capable of feeding, educating, and providing essential services to its people then there is no hope for mankind in the long term.

Alright. I am now stepping off my soapbox. Back to my fictional worlds.

Picks of the Week

It's that time again, folks. After nearly eight months of sheer, college football free hell, the greatest sport ever invented by man is back on and consequently I'm back with my usually wrong predictions. This is the first week so it's very likely I will be waaaaay off base with these guesses, so bear with me, folks. It may take a few weeks for me to get my bearings.

A few notes about this blog post, and subsequent posts in the series:

Accidents of Style

It's not like authors have a lack of choices when it comes to style and grammar reference books but Charles Harrington Elster's Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not To Write Badly, has been getting a lot of press lately. I haven't checked out the book myself but here's a little ditty from the Lexington Examiner.