Point of View

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Point of View: The Great Escape

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Man staring at buildings made of books - deposit photos

I can’t bear it. I can’t let myself think too far ahead right now. I know the awful is coming, and for a few more precious weeks, I just want to bury my head in the sand like they say ostriches do (even though they don’t, really). So I’m looking for a few all-encompassing escapes. One of those is popular entertainment. Mark and I are binging the whole Ally McBeal series, which was from the late nineties and dealt with grand themes like misogyny in the workplace, which thankfully no longer exists (this is where I really need a sarcasm … Read more

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Point of View: Stuck in Life’s Elevator

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stuck in an elevator - deposit photos

I have to admit, I’m at a bit of a loss on what to write about this week. Everything feels… stuck. Like we’re in an elevator that never makes it to the ground floor. I’m in the middle of writing three different books – a problem of my own devising, I’ll admit, and one that lets me range through different genres and keep my multi-tasky brain happy. But it also means I’m in three different muddy middles at once. Stuck. I’ve been looking for a new job for a full year now, and though time and time again I get … Read more

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Point of View: Seasons of Change

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Autumn forest - deposit photos

Fall is finally here in Northern California. Officially, it arrived a little over three weeks ago, but we had temperatures into the hundreds until early last week. Now at last, the days are milder and the Delta Breeze brings us cool air in the evenings. There’s that indefinable sense of change in the air, when the leaves slowly start to yellow, the days grow noticeably shorter, and many of our favorite television shows return, creating a train wreck in our streaming apps. The seasons of life are slowly changing too. Mark and I just said goodbye to two dear friends, … Read more

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Point of View: Loss, Hope, and Life Journeys

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lighted path - deposit photos

It won’t be long now. A dear friend of ours is in hospice care, on the final steps of her life journey. It came on suddenly, and her decline has been shocking and heartbreaking. Yesterday, we saw her for probably the last time. While I wouldn’t have missed it, I couldn’t help thinking that the person we used to know was already gone. A few days ago, I had a phone conversation with my Mom, who had just lost one of her beloved dogs, Jake. She talked about loss, not just of the people and fur babies in her life, … Read more

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Point of View: Filtering Reality

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writer staring out window - deposit photos

Reality informs everything we write. We grow up in the real world. We learn the real names of things, we navigate our way through real life and real school and real relationships. Our lives are lived solidly in the real world, and we can’t help that, as writers, our fiction is shaped by it. And yet… Books (and TV and film) are by their very nature escapist mediums. They let us turn off our brains to escape reality for an hour (or three) and immerse ourselves in someone else’s version of the world. During the great Depression, movies were one … Read more

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Point of View: Living In the In-Between

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Inbetween - Deposit Photos

Everything feels… suspended. For nine years, Mark and I have lived in a rental that we planned to inhabit for one, planning to buy a house – something we’ve never been able to manage. For two years, we’ve been in a state of political suspension, broken only when President Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris jumped into the race. For more than a year, we’ve watched as friend after friend battled cancer, some of them succumbing to this horrid disease. For eleven months, I’ve been searching for a job, poring over thousands and thousands of job listings – often hundreds … Read more

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Point of View: Sac Anime!

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Scott cooked after Sac Anime

Hey all… a short one today. I spent the last three days at Sac Anime – which is a really big deal. Who knew? Over 30,000 people showed up for the con, including the voice of Sponge Bob! We felt very welcomed – so many queers in anime. 🙂 So since I’m a bit cooked today, I thought I’d share some photos. Enjoy! Back to the usual POV next week.

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Point of View: Ruminating on Joy

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joy - deposit photos

I’ve been ruminating (we writers don’t just think about things… we go the extra mile and ruminate) on joy. It’s no exaggeration to say that the last eight years have been a dumpster fire. Slogging through four years of an administration diametrically opposed to me and Mark and everything we believe in, followed by a pandemic from hell and years of inflation… it’s been hard to feel anything other than rank despair. This long interregnum has been punctuated by brief windows of hope – when our new President entered the Oval Office, when a vaccine let us creep outside of … Read more

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Point of View: Lessons Learned

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Lessons Learned - Deposit Photos

I’m fifty-six years old. I’ve watched this planet swing around the sun for 224 seasons, seeing winter melting into spring, spring blossoming into summer, summer sizzling into autumn, and autumn falling headlong once again into winter. When I was eighteen, I knew everything, and each new year since has been an exercise in realizing just how much I don’t know. And yet, I have learned a few things on this long road, life lessons that have served me well. I’ll share some of them with you here, in no particular order, i they hope that they might be helpful. Almost … Read more

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Point of View: Writing (Really) Short

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Haiku - Deposit Photos

Over the last eight years, we’ve constantly been searching to cope with a world turned upside down. Mark and I have tried a variety of self-care methods – long showers, walks through the neighborhood, spending time in a coffee shop. But last year we discovered a new method. The daily haiku. The New York Times had an article about expressing yourself this way, and we thought “what the heck?” So we started sending each other a short poem each morning, encapsulating our hopes, fears, dreams and delights in seventeen syllables a day. We’ve since shared the practice with a few … Read more