Point of View

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Seasons of Change

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Loss, Hope, and Life Journeys

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Filtering Reality

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Living In the In-Between

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Sac Anime!

by
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.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Ruminating on Joy

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Lessons Learned

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Writing (Really) Short

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: The Unsettling Pace of Change

by
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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Hiding Easter Eggs

by
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