This Is My Experience
I’ve had a number of comments and private messages about my rant about my MacBook Pro. People have pointed out that their Macs are reliable and they’ve never had a problem with them. People have also told me that their PCs are very unreliable. My initial response has been that’s all well and good, but it’s not been my experience. On reflection my sour response is not really fair. My friends and commenters are simply telling me what has happened to them, just as I am telling them what has happened to me. They clearly live in a world where Read more…
Whatever Happened to It Just Works?
Warning– middle aged man ranting about first world problem alert. I am just venting about my recent problems with my Mac. Feel free to ignore. After the last couple of operating system releases, the wifi on my Mac has always been hosed. It’s been glitchy, with dropped connections, greyed out icons for Dropbox and OneDrive and browsers telling me that they cannot connect. It was bad after the El Capitan upgrade but this last week it has been plain awful. My Mac won’t connect to the Internet at all in the co-working space I frequent, and it struggles at home. Read more…
Pantsing
Yesterday I was talking about the new military SF novel. I should have mentioned that I am experimenting with a new writing method. That may explain why it has been so much fun. Normally I am an outliner. The corpses of unfinished novels littered my early career. I started off on short stories, and in those days I always found them easy to write. I could hold the whole idea in my mind, write the first draft in a few days and move on to the next project. Things fell to pieces when I tried to apply the same technique Read more…
Sweet Sixteen
So yesterday I hit 16 posts this month, precisely twice as many as I managed in all of last year. I’m going to give myself a hearty pat on the back for that. I’ll also confess I am a bit stuck for something to write about today so I am just going to talk about recent developments in my writing and travel plans. Bear with me, I am new to this daily blogging thing. I was very surprised to discover my military SF novel seems to have taken on a life of its own. I sat down to write a Read more…
The Limits of Outlining
I tend to be an outliner but these have their limits as I discovered when working on the latest Kormak short story. I’ve had half this tale sitting on my hard drive for years. I really liked the opening but I could never find a way of making the story work. I got myself into a real tangle by introducing an interesting new character with a big backstory and then not really knowing what to do with her. Frustrated, I put the story away and just left it. A couple of weeks back I decided I was going to finish Read more…
The Sword and Sorcery Bundle of Holding
The current Bundle of Holding is on a subject very close to my heart. It’s a collection of sword and sorcery games in the spirit of Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Elric. I bought it even though I owned two of the games already. Both of the previous editions of the classic Barbarians of Lemuria are in my collection. BoL a very accessible and well-designed game. The original edition was inspired by Lin Carter’s not-so-classic Thongor novels, which I have already written about elsewhere and it captures the feel of them very well. The bundle contains the Mythic Read more…
^