Sunday afternoon on a long weekend and what am I doing? Well, apart from some (perhaps) deserved rest-time after a grueling morning run followed by a couple hours in the sun planting the rest of my garden, I’m writing the second installment in this new feature I’ve called my “week of lists.” This edition stems out of three things: (1) I’ve been quite verbose on this blog lately, and I’m sure some people wonder where all the inspiration comes from, (2) I needed something [...]

As I continue to (inadvertently) turn this blog into a series of “special feature” articles, I introduce yet another new series here on this, my lunch hour: Five Topics, also known as five posts I hope YOU write. Five blog idea starters. Five topics to get you rolling. Five blog article prompts and kickers to get you tapping stories into your keyboard. Write. Post. Share. Then let me know in the comments, by way of a link-back or via an automated trackback and not [...]

It was something Claire said; She has been decidedly artistic lately. I don’t know if it’s a phase or a personality quirk or a blossoming skill, but she’s been churning out this inspired quantity of increasingly complex art lately. And not just any old art: sequential art, which for those of you who are following, is impressive for anyone, let alone a four-year-old little girl. Claire said: “Dad, we need to make a book for Mom.” By which, of course, I think she meant [...]

It’s a funny thing to go looking for… for me at, least. I was trolling through Amazon’s site looking for a book on journal writing. Y’know… a book about this exact thing that I’m doing right here on this web page. A book about how to keep a collection of personal writing for, say, a third of your life and make it readable with a deliberate purpose. Of course, most of what I found looked like complete rubbish. The low down: The “how to [...]

This should be the last of the Disneyland posts for a while… I promise. But having spent the entire of last week in the so-called Happiest Place on Earth (TM) and returning with only a handful of memories in the form of videos, photos, tacky souvenirs, and mixed emotions, I thought I had better write one last post to sum up one of my own trademarked quirky observations. This was our third trip to the resort, and each time we’ve gone it’s been a [...]

This is not a post about how I haven’t been writing as much as I would have liked. What to readers might come across as a distinct span of quiet punctuating a near-year of fairly prolific blogging is not the subject of this blog. Instead, it is merely mentioned because all that time I would have normally developed to writing new content here has instead been deeply invested in a more meta-focused task: re-reading. That’s right. Odd as it might sound, I’ve been reading [...]

I’ve been reading through Scott McCleod’s Understanding Comics, a kind-of non-fiction graphic-novel-esque work that deconstructs the art of comics in the form of a comic. It is an aging work, originally published in 1993, and thus has little to say about the advent of web comics and such (topics I assume are covered in his newer books written in a similar style.) But this is largely inconsequential because the perspective McCleod takes is easily translatable to newer and (likely) future mediums. What struck me [...]

While I haven’t been writing a novel this month for the infamous NaNoWrimo, I have been working on a different and still very interesting (at least, to me) creative project. Astute readers may recall that I dabbled in the creating of a web comic about a year and a half ago. It was an exercise in many ideas, not the least of which was — simply — my interest in creating a web comic. But the effort itself was also very useful in allowing [...]

I was not impressed by an article I read in Salon yesterday (“Better yet, DON’T write that novel” by Laura Miller) encouraging writers to ignore the allure of events like NaNoWriMo and keep their novels in their heads. Nothing stinks so much of true elitism — not the we-disagree-thus-you’re-being-elitist kind of faux-political elitism — than someone who has struggled through, had a few lucky breaks, had an interesting idea, and made some progress on their career by publishing a couple mediocre-selling books then going [...]

A Random Find? I was poking through some old (Google Docs) documents and found this essay on running I’d written back in 2009 for a project I’d started and never completed. It’s not polished, but it’s complete, and I thought rather than hide it away in some dusty digital archive, I may as well hang it out for folks to read. It might be interesting for someone. Interface: a point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact. Let’s begin. The ambient air temperature [...]

The September Saturdays Stockpile of Silly Schemes seeks to detail the spark, struggle, and stress of those projects. In each Saturday post I hope to reveal a bit of the speculation, study, and strategy behind one particular project, summarized in a week of thought but a single post. And in concluding each post, I hope to give you, my readers, a sense of the shape, status, and steering that I strive to send myself to some sense of success for those efforts. 1. How [...]

I’m always working on some kind of little side project. It’s my compulsion. My writing and photography. Random coding projects. This blog. And the “silly schemes” project too is a kind of meta-project, itself. Many of my little projects are creative endeavors ranging from those that are vague, floating ideas existing solely in my brain to those with more structure, for which a bunch of work has been done — but forever in-progress, forever ongoing. The September Saturdays Stockpile of Silly Schemes seeks to [...]

There has been a lot of buzz over ‘The Gap’ lately. The Creative Gap. Maybe you’ve seen it. I’ve seen hints of it roll through the social networks in the last couple of weeks, getting all inspiring on our feeds and walls and such, particularly tweaking the eager minds of young creative professionals and their wannabe counterparts. But what is this ‘The Gap’… and no, I write not of the ubiquitously famous and identically named clothing retailer one might find peddling khakis in the [...]

I’ve been watching The Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition on Blu-Ray. I picked it up on release day a couple weeks ago because the only copy of the movies I owned (I know poor excuse) was the previously-viewed, full-screen, standard-definition, theatre-release versions I bought from Blockbuster back when I was living in Vancouver. And I really like the movies. They are solid and faithful enough to the spirit of the text that they seem, even now, ten years on to show a kind [...]

As far as bucket-list-life-experiences go, the whole vague idea of ‘Recognition for Accomplishments in the Field of Wordsmithery’ has been on that bucket-list for a very long time. So, it seems that I really should think about it more. Or, so I tell myself.

Thing is, something I do quiet enjoy thinking and writing about is parenting topics. It’s a big, important part of my life these days. But I also have to fully admit that I’ve lately been ignoring something related to that job, and the ‘other duties as required’ classification that goes along with. See, for the longest time — well, since a few months prior to this whole fatherhood gig — I have actually, diligently, been busy keeping a fairly extensive collection of writings on fatherhood. Some have been here. Some have been other places.

What’s there to say? A month ago today I started typing away on this blog again and forty-some posts later I seem to be back in the habit. But no. It’s been good. It’s been cathartic, in a sense. Things in my life are reasonably calm and relaxed, and the ability to open up and just, y’know, write… fill pages with this stuff that’s floating around my brain… has been useful. And still, it helps that this is pretty much a private place. I’m [...]

It’s been funny how easy it has been to slip back into this blogging thing. Just like that, and three weeks have gone by. Yesterday was Towel Day, the annual celebration of the life of Douglas Adams. I forgot to bring my towel to work — sad but true — though I did take the opportunity to crack open my Audible archives and start listening again to The Salmon of Doubt, which is awesome for so many reasons not the least of which is [...]

What? Do you think writing a snarky, introspective, wannabe-philosophical blog is clever or something? Sure. But what exactly does that make someone who is reading a snarky, introspective, wannabe-philosophical blog? Thing is, and twenty years on, a lot of us have figured out that this internet thing is basically a vaguely-sorted, half-baked collection of documents written or otherwise created by a very large number of authors and consumed by an even larger number of netizens. Sure, you’re going to find funny stuff online, and [...]

clicked; loaded; yet another viral page? gossip? scuttle? the babble of our age; philosophic musings? drivel? delights? more opinioned discourse? more low-brow fights? no. echos of purpose, pride. i goaded. toeing silent pools for blog reloaded. fourteen months, a password, blocked from view, while substituted words trickled in lieu. one collection ended, another paused. nothing in the middle but percieved flaws, mis-directed blaming, anger, and fear, but streched in the middle: a vacant year. see the words, wrapped down the screen, author passed; while [...]

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about my content lately. Part of this is due to my renewed personal interest in this, my blog and some of the efforts I’ve been making in the last couple days to add some vast quantities of metadata to the same, while another part is due to the confluence of life events (including people announcing they are moving, professional discussions I’ve had, and the bombardment of my random interactions with the web and the impact they’ve been making [...]

I could find all kinds of excuses for my idle lack of posts here, but the biggest and juciest of them all would be NaNoWriMo, of course. The month-long writing challenge kicked off a little more than two weeks ago, and — as of this writing — I’m managed to generate a thirty-thousand word gush of semi-respectable draft fiction (an this on top of accepting and prepping for a new job, looking after my daughter more often than normal, dealing with the brutal arrival [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. Surprised? One of the themes for a bunch of my recent stuff has been to get away from the hard science fiction and fantasy writing and build stories around slightly more plausible fictions, in particular stories about the culture and ideas of the net. From a couple of perspectives, namely that of (a) a hack of a social anthropologist and (b) a card-carrying member of the geek tribe, net culture is fascinating to me. So, rather [...]