So those who have been around here for a while may recall that I published my most recent novel, Father’s Books, with a “temporary limited edition” cover while I was waiting for the final cover artwork from Émilie Léger, who has provided the cover art for each of my books since Shards. For most of those books I selected an existing piece from Émilie‘s oeuvre*, but in the case of Father’s Books I couldn’t find one that seemed quite right, and so Émilie created a new one for me, which can now be revealed:
Continue reading ““Father’s Books”: The Non-Limited Edition Cover!”Teaser Tuesday: “The Fall of Hyperion”
So this week I was reading The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, which is a “sequel”, of sorts, to Hyperion.
The Early Years: Senses+
So this being a holiday weekend (although this post should appear the week after Memorial Day, assuming I don’t screw up the scheduling, it was actually prepared the week before), I was feeling kind of lazy, and decided to dip back into the giant cache of my elementary school papers that my folks excavated from the house where I grew up. This week, I grabbed a mimeograph of an old assignment about the senses:
Continue reading “The Early Years: Senses+”Not A Review Of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision”
So recently, mainly as a result of a series of mixups about changing out hardware, we became aware that our local cable company had altered their pricing bundles:
Meaning that it was now possible to cancel the cable portion without having the price of the Internet and land line* portions jacked up so high that the price was basically the same as if we hadn’t canceled cable. Given that we don’t actually watch very much cable—many of the shows I used to watch, such as Into the Badlands and Preacher, have been canceled or died of natural causes, while others, such as Doctor Who, Resident Alien, and Battlebots, are on hiatus—we decided to go ahead and cut that particular cord, thus freeing up close to $200 a month. (Yes, I know, everyone else did this five or ten years ago.)
Continue reading “Not A Review Of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision””Fear the Wonky Subtitles
So as I’ve mentioned before, ever since, in his old age, Dennis the Vizsla took to noisily exhorting the humans to go to bed already in the evenings, we’ve been watching television with the subtitles on. In addition to helping with sometimes unclear dialog, subtitles can be humorous, grammatically horrifying, or subtly (or not-so-subtly) different from the actual spoken dialog.
Then there’s this, from Fear the Walking Dead:
Continue reading “Fear the Wonky Subtitles”Teaser Tuesday: “Rogues”
So this week I’ve been reading Rogues, an anthology edited by George R.R. “What Do You Mean I Should Be Finishing Game of Thrones Instead of Editing Anthologies” Martin and Gardner Dozois:
White & Nerdy?
So I recently had occasion to look up some old Weird Al videos, specifically, “I Lost On Jeopardy”:
Not a Review of “Mare of Easttown” and “Upload”
So over the last few weeks, with Dickinson between seasons, we’ve sort of been looking for some new programs to intersperse amongst the lighter Big Bang Theory and New Adventures of Old Christine fare—sitcoms that my wife likes to refer to as “dessert”. I had been hoping the new HBO series The Nevers would fit the bill:
Continue reading “Not a Review of “Mare of Easttown” and “Upload””To the Costco!
So back at the beginning of April, my wife and I became eligible to receive our COVID-19 vaccinations here in California; we couldn’t get them sooner than that because neither of us fell into any of the previously-prioritized high-risk age, essential occupation (my wife is a substitute teacher and animal trainer who stopped doing in-person work once the pandemic started picking up steam last March, and I have worked from home for years—not, unfortunately, as a full time fiction writer) or medical categories (“The Event” notwithstanding). Once the window opened for us, we had about two weeks before it opened for every adult in the state, so we figured we needed to get scheduled as soon as we could. But of course, first, there was bureaucracy to navigate―nothing as Kafkaesque as The Saga of the Possibly Rabid Skunk, but still.
Continue reading “To the Costco!”Teaser Tuesday: “Summerland”
So recently I was reading Summerland, a fantasy novel by Michael Chabon, who you may remember from such books as Wonder Boys and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which has never appeared as a Teaser Tuesday because I read it way back when Teaser Tuesday was just Tuesday.
Viscosity 