Point of View

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POINT OF VIEW: Pivot Points

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fork in the road - deposit photos

In most fictional tales, the character(s) face a pivotal choice that will change everything. It can be as simple as deciding to declare your love in public for a secret crush. Or as big and bold as stealing the US Constitution (so-so movie, cool premise). Whatever the choice, it changes the course of the plot and impacts everything that comes after. Life is like that too. I was born to two loving parents. Well, they loved me but not each other. They divorced when I was little, and my mother got custody. My dad saw me on weekends, and things … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Lemons

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Lemons - Pixabay

“When Life gives you lemons…” Life has given us a lot of lemons lately. There’s a war on in Europe. There’s a never-ending plague. My writing career seems to be stalled in second gear, as I try to finish a trilogy that has consumed my life for nigh on two years. And real estate prices are raging like a five-alarm fire here in Sacramento. It’s dawning on us that we will probably never own a home again. All of this fills me like a fog on a cold winter’s day. Somehow I need to have hope. Somehow I need to … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: I’m a Trafficker

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Drug Trafficker - Deposit Photos

Confession time. I’m a trafficker. You may have seen me, lurking around the dark corners of the internet, hand in pocket, waiting to share the drug so many of you desperately need right now. It’s called Hope. Peddling Hope is a dubious business these days. Hope has so much competition – sarcasm, cynicism, gaslighting and outright lies, anger, and fraud. Hope has it tough, what with the four horsemen of the apocalypse loose on the Earth. What chance does little old Hope have? There’s this psychological thing I ran across shortly after the lockdowns started. It’s called “sense of a … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Seven Things I Betcha Didn’t Know…

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Scott Band Uniform Flute

Another fun one today. Thought I’d share a few things about me you probably didn’t know (unless you’re my mother, who reads this regularly – she most likely knows all these things! *waves* Hey mom! Or Mark. Yeah, he knows all this stuff. *kiss* So here it goes. 1. I was a band geek.As you might have guessed from the photo above, I was in the marching band. Our sports teams were the Dorados, which was probably mildly appropriative (we didn’t talk about those kinds of things back in the mid 80’s) and we were once referred to by an … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Just Another Manic (Covid) Monday

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Monday - Deposit Photos

I’ve started to dread Mondays. After a quiet weekend, everyone wakes up Monday morning with one thing on their minds – fill Scott’s email box with inquiries, problems, announcements, and enough spam to make a Monty Python film. Add to that the unremitting dull, grinding sameness of life under lockdown – sleep, eat, rinse, repeat. And we do a LOT of rinsing, emptying the dishwasher seven times a day and wash enough clothes to string a line from here to Rome every week. Thank heaven I have a husband who does as much – and probably more – around the … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Navigating the Story

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Tharassas map

I thought I’d have a little fun today and share a unique part of my writing process – navigating my worlds via maps – along with my hand-drawn draft version of the map for my WIP trilogy The Tharassas Cycle. For my sci-fi and sci-fantasy stories, maps are one of the first things I make. Growing up, I was entranced by maps of Middle Earth and Pern in particular (I may or may not own atlases for both worlds) and would refer back to them multiple times during my reading of each story, figuring out where my favorite characters were. … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: When it All Changes

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fork in the road - deposit photos

There are a few points in each person’s life where a chance decision changes the course of their future history, shifting everything to come onto a new path. We rarely see these in advance. They often only become clear in retrospect. I’ve had a few of these in my own life. The first these was my decision (with my mother’s blessing) to leave her home in Tucson to live with my father for a year in Rancho Cucamonga, California. I was sixteen at the time, and this one decision altered everything that was to come after, setting me on a … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know…

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scott-bunny

Hey all… another fun one this week because I need a little levity in my life. 🙂 I thought I’d share a few things you probably don’t know about me! My First Publication Credit: To hear my About Me page tell it, my first published work was the short story “The Bear at the Bar,” in the A Taste of Honey antho edited by Anne Regan and B.G. Thomas (now available in my Spells & Stardust collection). But that’s not entirely true. My first publishing credit was actually twenty-six years earlier, in 1988, for the book Raising Each Other, a … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: What I’m Watching

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Ghosts

I need a break from writing about writing and writing about the sucky things in the world, so I thought I’d share some of my fave current spec fic TV shows! GhostsCBS/Paramount+Seasons: One We stumbled upon this comedy a couple months ago, and what a delight it is. The premise – ghosts haunt the living – is as old as the hills, but somehow the quirky cast – a ditzy hippie, a prim-and-proper 18th century housewife, a pants-less stockbroker, a Boy Scout troop leader, a native american guy who was… well, no spoilers, and a Viking warrior with an endearing … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Sci-Fi Hopes and Dreams

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Futuristic city - deposit photos

The world is in a downward spiral. If covid doesn’t get us, climate change, the rise of the populist right, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse probably will. There is ample reason to be downright pessimistic about the future of the human race and the planet in general – who will come to save us? All prospects look dim. But as a sci-fi writer and someone dedicated to finding hope, being down on the future is not my job. So I thought I’d share a few future wishes that I’d like to see come true, regardless of the current … Read more