This coming weekend, my wife and I will celebrate our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. Ours has been a good marriage which, despite our many flaws and foibles, despite our misjudgments both large and small, has been a source of strength and comfort to us both.
Oddly, though, we don’t have any traditions for celebrating our wedding anniversary. That’s not to say that we are tradition-averse; far from it. Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture | Tagged celebrations, traditions, wedding anniversary | 2 Comments »
summer’s iron hand
beats me with light
with heat
my mind winces
whipped dog shying
hiding in darkened corners
then, for a few hours
clouds bring respite
moisture’s brief touch
salves my skin
saves my soul
Posted in Writing | Tagged creative writing, Poetry, vignettes, Writing | Leave a Comment »
Just because I wasn’t writing, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing.
I know to some it seems like I’ve been procrastinating, putting off actually breaking through my years-long writer’s block, but it hasn’t been all “Mañana, baby.”
In fact, in the past month, I did a lot of writing. No words written, but a lot of writing, nonetheless.
It began with re-reading one of my older books, and culminated (well, so far) over this past weekend when I had a revelation about my difficulty getting to Page One. Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged creative writing, novel writing, procrastinating, Writing | 2 Comments »
My holiday weekend was less than stellar, mostly because I was on-call and got several alerts on several nights during the wee hours. Grrr.
However, it was not without some good. One of the high points was a new game: Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games) which is available for the PS4 (currently on sale for about $40).
HZD is an open world, third-person POV, quest-structured game along the lines of the Far Cry or Elder Scrolls, but in my opinion HZD is far and away superior to those others and primarily for one single reason: the writing. Continue Reading »
Posted in Hi Tech | Tagged game review, gamers, Gaming, guerrilla games, Horizon Zero Dawn, playstation, ps4 | 3 Comments »
Typing. Deleting. More typing. More deleting. MOAR typing. Delete delete delete. Delete it all. Every last word, comma, and period.
That was yesterday.
I was working on an essay for this blog and … it wasn’t going well. I was working on a topic that had been rolling around in my head for a month. All my arguments and counterarguments were lined up. I even had a catchy title … well, I thought it was a catchy title, until I googled it and found a hundred thousand other uses of it (including one by Garrison Keillor, which I discovered in a moment that was both uplifting and depressing).
Anyway, for hours I wrote and deleted in precisely equal measure, and in the end I was left with the same blank page I’d started with.
At which point I stopped and wondered: why was I having so much trouble?
The answer was obvious: I had no passion for the topic.
Not anymore, anyway.
Oh, when the idea first struck me, I was all fired up and ready to unleash my staggering intellect upon the world. See my reasoning and despair! But now, a month later, things have changed. Not externally. The premise still stands, the argument still works, and I can find no flaw in my logic, but internally … I just don’t care about it anymore.
This is not a bad thing. Continue Reading »
Posted in Creativity, Writing | Tagged creative writing, novel writing, why do i write, writers block | 3 Comments »
While I’m working on something more meaty, here’s a bit of fun.
Like most people my age, I learned to type on a manual typewriter, an old Smith-Corona, to be precise. It was heavy — damned heavy — and came in its own nearly-as-heavy hard-sided case. It had a black-and-red ribbon that always got twisted, the keys continually got hooked onto one another, and after typing up an evening’s homework, my forearms ached from the physical exertion of pressing down the keys. That’s no exaggeration; it took some oomph to make those levers thwack with enough force to register through to the carbon copy.
What’s a carbon copy, you ask? Well, it’s a … nope, I don’t have time or space to explain it all. Continue Reading »
Posted in Creativity, Hi Tech, Low Tech | Tagged manual typewriters, qwerkywriter, retro keyboards, Writing | 3 Comments »
Last week we screened Logan, the latest movie starring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. (I was on vacation … don’t judge!) You all know I’m not a big fan of comic-book-inspired films, but Jackman has always surprised me with his talent — in comedies, musicals, and dramas alike — and from the trailer, this one looked interesting enough to warrant the rental. As it turned out, it was worth both the time and the money, but more than that, it reminded me of the harshest criticism I’ve ever received on one of my novels.
Back when I still had a New York literary agent, I turned in the manuscript of my new historical fantasy, Ploughman’s Son, in the hopes that we might begin shopping it around to publishers. I’d worked on it for a long time, bringing it from a weird idea to a published short story and then, following months of research into 9th century Brittany, Europe, and medieval life, I’d forged it into a fantasy novel unlike any I’d ever read.
It was historically accurate from a societal, cultural, and political perspective. It depicted the incredibly harsh and violent conditions that most people endured in what we call The Dark Ages. The pantheon and legends it explored were some that I’d never encountered in other fantasy novels. And yet it also included the basics of the genre, tropes that were familiar enough to engage fans of fantasy, but different enough to keep them interested.
My agent read it, and responded with her opinion. Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged high fantasy, hugh jackman, logan, novel writing, ploughman's son, realism in fantasy, The Ploughman Chronicles, wolverine, writers block, x-men | 1 Comment »
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 