Point of View

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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

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Point of View: The Unsettling Pace of Change

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Wayfarer's Chapel - Rancho Palos Verdes

We live in one of those interesting times that the old (purported) Chinese curse speaks of. Change is happening all around us, epitomized by that greatest one of all, climate change, but also evident in our technology, politics, and society. In just twenty years, the idea that a man like me could marry another man went from patently absurd to an accepted reality. In just eight years, we went from the end of the term of our first black president to this churning reality we find ourselves in now, holding our collective breath while seemingly suspended over the abyss. And … Read more

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Point of View: Hiding Easter Eggs

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golden easter egg - deposit photos

One of my favorite things about writing is the idea of the “Easter egg.” This concept started out in video games, where developers would hide a surprise in a bit of code that might trigger a secret weapon, a cache of gold coins, or some other cool thing that wasn’t an official part of the game. The term has since evolved in fiction to mean a bit of information in a story that connects one work to another, but only for readers who are familiar with both. I’ve been writing regularly again, which makes me very happy. I’m going about … Read more

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Point of View: BayCon!

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BayCon Book Launch Party 2024

Just got back from BayCon and am madly running around putting things away and processing inventory and sales data, so today will be brief. We had a great time. We ran the LimFic table with Marvin Neu, Bel Sikes, Sheryl Hayes, Denise Tanaka, Amanda Cherry, Lillian Csernica, RL Merrill, Mike Karpa and Sumiko Saulson, and sold a decent amount of books. This was the first year for BayCon under new management – Mark and I are charter members of the reorganized con. And for the next two years, WesterCon and BayCon will merge, so we’re hoping for even more good … Read more

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Point of View: Making the Cover – The Death Bringer

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It’s time once again to share the making of a cover. This time, for the final book of “The Tharassas Cycle” – The Death Bringer. The fabulous Kelley York and Sleepy Fox Studios crafted this one for me. We started with a few possibilities: We tried the last one, an alien creature who looked a bit like a hammerhead shark: Not quite there. So I asked Kelley to try the fourth one: It needed… something. How about some creepy eyes? And finally for the coup de grace… a tail: Put it all together, and: I’m thrilled with the final result, … Read more