Tag: fiction

  • Perfect Stories

    29 Sep 2021 » 3 min read

    One of the things I love about baseball is that it is possible to have a “perfect game.” A perfect game is one in which a pitcher faces 27 batters, and not one of them gets on base. There are no hits, no walks, no one hit by a pitch, no one ever making it…

  • 5 Interesting Reads – 9/11/2021

    11 Sep 2021 » 2 min read about interesting-reads, Reading & Books

    Here are some of the more interesting reads I’ve come across the the last few weeks. Let me know if any of these stand out for you. And if you have interesting reads of your own to recommend, please drop them in the comments. After “hearing” many of our kids’ classes while they were remote…

  • Original Fiction?

    08 Jul 2021 » 2 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    One thing that I have never posted on the blog over the last 16 years is original fiction: that is, fiction I’ve written that has not appeared anywhere else. The main reason I’ve never done this is because publishing a story on the Internet is considered a first publication. Since the “first serial rights” are…

  • Writing prompts

    09 Jun 2011 » 2 min read about Writing & Publishing

    Over at the Arlington Writers Group last night, we had one of our “hybrid” meetups. This is where a portion of the meetup is spent on a critique, while another portion is spent on some kind of exercise. Last night, the exercise was writing prompts. We were given a bunch of prompts that came from…

  • Free fiction: When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer

    16 Mar 2011 » 1 min read about Writing & Publishing

    I’ve been asked a couple of times recently if any of my stories were freely available online. For a while they weren’t but as of today, my first published story, “When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer” is now freely available here on my website. Several people suggested that I make the story available on the…

  • Boskone, day 1

    16 Feb 2008 » 2 min read

    Almost midnight and I’m back from my first day (well, evening really) as Boskone. It’s been a lot of fun. I attended two panels. The first was “Selling What You Write” and it was interesting, but I realized that it was probably not something that I needed to attend, having made one sale already. This…

  • Protected: The National Pastime

    27 Aug 2007 » 40 min read

    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Immitation of life

    28 Jan 2007 » 2 min read

    Last night, I caught Jarhead on HBO and afterward found myself thinking that I wanted to be a Marine. Don’t get me wrong, this is not unique to either the movie, or the subject of the film. I often find myself wishing I was whatever it was that I was just watching on some interesting…

  • Retiring some stories

    29 Jul 2006 » 1 min read about Writing & Publishing

    Every few years, I go through the stories that I’ve written and have failed to sell, and ultimately retire them. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve gone through a few rounds of this, and each round represents a generation of my stories. Each round, also, I like to thing, represents a better and better set…

  • Writer’s itch

    07 Jul 2006 » 1 min read about Writing & Publishing

    And in addition to everything else I’ve got going on, I began this evening to have the first stirrings, the first twinges of desire to pull my novella, “Graveyard Shift” out of the desk drawer and set to work on completing it. It’s been in the drawer for months now and I think I’m ready…

  • Domestic spying and Da Vinvi Code

    15 May 2006 » 1 min read

    I keep reading (and hearing) in the news that the government did nothing illegal when requesting phone records, and other sort of spying on Americans. That is probably true, and while I don’t have evidence for it, I’ll take that at face value. Because to me, that’s not the point. There are lots of things…

  • Bicentennial Man

    01 May 2006 » 1 min read about Reading & Books

    One of perhaps a handful of stories that brings tears to my eyes when I read it is Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man”. I have read it at least three times by actual count (most recently this evening) and it is one of the more remarkable, moving stories I have ever read. I wish I…