The Taco Stand
Before Slumdog Millionaire, before the weekly Lottery, before overnight fame came from being discovered on YouTube, there was hope fueled by imagination sitting around the coffee table late at night. My Mom met her best friend when we shared space at a local motel in the heart of Silicon Valley- when it was just called Sunnyvale-1966. Ben and Margaret Read had just moved from North Carolina ...
The Passion of Augusto Boal
I've been waiting a week for the obituary on Augusto Boal that appeared in Saturday's New York Times. He passed away last Saturday at the age of 78. Boal was a giant figure and a defining influence on the practice of art that is simultaneously the practice of politics (and though some Boal disciples might disagree with me, the practice of spirituality), which is the intersection that feels most ...
Language textbooks and the crime writer
Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:You can tell a great deal about a people from the conversations in language textbooks. After all, they aim to teach you the words people speak, but also the character of those teaching them and what it might be like to live in their society.I first cottoned to this when I learned Spanish. My textbook included a basic ...
Saying Good-bye: Pain and Misery...
Boy, did I love him. He was over six feet tall, beautiful black cherry skin, muscular and extremely handsome. I truly loved him. Our life together was destined to be perfect. A loyal soldier in Uncle’s Sam’s army and an office manager at an Elementary School, there was nothing impeding our imminent joy and bright future. At least not until the fighting began. The first argument was the ...
Faur uses crayons tips to create pictures...
Christian Faur uses crayons to create art. (variant of pointillism?)
Evitable, wieldy, exorable, gainly, and corrigible
I get the a-word-a-day newsletter from http://www.wordsmith.org. This week their theme was "forgotten positives," which sounds like it could have a whole other meaning besides a grammatical one. The words featured were evitable (as in inevitable), wieldy (as in unwieldy), exorable (as in inexorable), gainly (as in ungainly), and corrigible (as in incorrigible). Some of them surprised me ...
Missteps and Stumbles on the Publication Road
My first published book was an ebook collection of my erotic short fiction. I picked the publisher based not on any previous experience with them but because I liked their design sense and because they seemed like they might be a good fit. The collection was accepted and I turned out to be mostly right about the design sense. On the one hand, I got a lovely cover and the ebook looked pretty good ...
Coming up for air
Like most people, I've been through some changes at my job in the past year. Between the hundreds of layoffs and multiple company re-orgs over the past 11 months, employee morale is at an all-time low. Everyone is struggling to stay motivated, with the rumor mill churning out weekly reports of gloom and doom yet to come.Although I escaped the company cuts (so far), I did fall victim to the ...
Cover is Up
The cover of Pop Apocalypse is now up on the Amazon Web site, so I thought this would be a good time to add a copy of the image here. I'm pretty excited with how it turned out.
Fork in the road
The process of landing a job has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Skills and knowledge play a role, of course, but in the end it all feels like a lottery. I believed for many years the art of hiring someone was all logic. But when I was part of a hiring committee, I was surprised at the decisions that were made, and the "logic" that was used. They used a weird sort of algorithm - ...
