As I’ve mentioned in other blogs, during my career I worked in the high-tech industry for something like thirty years. The job I retired from often dealt with what the development engineers liked to call “bleeding edge” technology. It was… Continue Reading…

𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒓𝒐𝒑𝒆 𝑻𝒂𝒍𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 (“Trope”: a common or overused theme or device.) The inherent nature of a genre trope is that nearly everyone engaged with the genre can recognize it. A genre writer can’t break the trope or they risk… Continue Reading…

I’m happy to go along pretending I’m not a “senior” in my own mind, but sometimes that mental image is psychically shattered by reality. I recently passed the one-year anniversary of retiring and am apparently still alive and kicking. I… Continue Reading…

I like to play a certain of game on my computer, mostly to make sure that whatever brain cells I have now will continue to be operational for an indefinite time period. I train those cells to interact nicely with… Continue Reading…

As a writer, I like being in control of the story. I have the “literary” power of life and death over the characters. Not that I’m a power-crazed maniac or anything, but doesn’t that sort of make me a god?… Continue Reading…

I’ve been binge-reading “cozy” murder mysteries set in the 1920s and 1930s. (I do question the coziness factor, since someone is always being murdered and how cozy could that be, really?) Invariably, in the books an elderly person has been… Continue Reading…

I was at the drug store today and automatically wandered down the toy aisle, in the same manner that whenever I’m in my car it automatically turns toward the grocery store whether I wanted to go there or not. Although… Continue Reading…

The weather here in the PNW has been fabulous and it’s been tough to keep the writing momentum going. I really need to get an outdoor office set up somehow. I’ve been working (I’d be lying if I said diligently)… Continue Reading…

I usually go around thinking I know everything there is to know about everything, but I recently realized that I have things to learn about the craft of writing. That may sound surprising, as (allow me an egotistical moment), having… Continue Reading…

Fair warning – I’m in the process of “aging out of life”, also known as getting old, which means I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about getting old. It’s tough to reconcile, since I don’t feel old, I… Continue Reading…