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Category Archives: Things!

Things that I personally think are awesome and want to share. Goofy shit. Serious shit. Poetry. Excerpts of work. Scenelets. Meh.

Swords, and intermittency

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Yeah, it’s been like, forever. But I’m still alive, and around, and still writing and editing and swording and translating. I hope all of you are well and feeling reasonably successful in your endeavors. I’m still plugging away, feeling like it’s three steps forward and two steps back, but at least I’m making some small headway. While I’m here — I have yet to receive my copy due to logistical kerfuffles, but I’m eagerly awaiting Tim Rivera’s translation of Godinho’s Art of Fencing! Not only has he translated the text, but he’s also included a lot of additional material, extracting and collecting key points in easily findable ways. In other news, I presented a taster course workshop on Godinho at Swordplay 2017 which was well-received, and learned a ton from other presenters (including Skye Hilton and Steaphen Fick), and had a lot of (never enough) bouts with fantastic friends old … Read on! →

I may have neglected to mention

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I may have neglected to mention that I’m in a podcast. In fact, I’m certain I haven’t mentioned it. I’m bad at self-promotion. But I’m good at promoting other people! So, let me introduce you to Priori, a YA fantasy podcast serial written by Emily Craven and performed by her, and several talented people, and incidentally, me. What’s the story about? I’ll let Emily tell you herself: Hunted by the Kraken, the sinister leader of the Ruhle Empire, Beverly Jordan must control her powers, known only as the ‘Priori, to survive. Believing her powers dirty, fit only for destruction and ruin, Beverly and her brother Charlie set off on a journey to find the fabled safe-haven of Creana, an underwater world where one can learn to split the fabric of time and manipulate the Lines of Power, where winged Alaequines soar through the air and the Shadows hide, waiting for … Read on! →

I should be asleep right now.

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I should, I really should. I started a new job at the beginning of the month, a full time one — no more 4-day weekends for me — as a full editor. Bilingual, no less. I am astonished, saddened, and shocked at how out of practice I am with it. I mean, a lot of it’s muscle memory, neural pathways burned like screens left on too long. You put words in front of me, I fix them! Or I try. Usually I’m pretty good. But it’s been a while since I’ve done this for pay, for several hours straight, in a facility dedicated to this purpose with equipment that is not mine to do it on. I love it. But my brain isn’t used to this kind of thing. Again, like a muscle, it’s out of practice, it’s gone soft from under-use (even with working on the doctoral research). And … Read on! →

Ambient noise generator

Link

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This is the most fantastic thing I’ve seen in a while: A Soft Murmur, which lets you mix your own background ambient noise loop.

Mix your own background ambient loop. BRILLIANT.

Mix your own background ambient loop. BRILLIANT.

I don’t know how long it’s been out, but it’s fantastic. There’s no hiccup where a track loops back on itself, and you can have all of the sliders up and running if you like and it doesn’t slow anything down, nor does the sound stutter. And you can set it up with timers — a timer to start, a timer to end, and a timer to just gently fade out. They’ve got an Android app, but no iPhone yet.

You can even share your own mix. Mine is rain, thunder, and waves, with a little wind and a hint of singing bowl thrown in. I’m absolutely in love.

 

Back in print

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Earlier this year, one of my friends from back in NYC invited me to contribute to an anthology for the ReDeus series, published by Crazy 8 Press. Briefly, the premise of the series is that the gods of yore have come back, and are quite ready to resume being worshipped as they once were. Native Lands features stories set in the Americas, where political games and turf wars between the native gods and those claiming people with non-American ancestry complicate an already difficult situation. I chose to play around in Yucatán, offering an educator and architect a choice that could lead to her own demise. I wrote about this in more detail in a guest post on Crazy 8’s blog, but there’s something I didn’t touch on there that I’d like to mull over and talk about here in a day or so. The reason I need the time is … Read on! →

Crash (but no burn): prologue

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It’s been way too long since I’ve posted here. That’s because I’ve been doing some hard thinking and scribbling in my story, and how I’m approaching it, and how I’m approaching the transmedia nature of it. And I have finally understood, as I stand at the accordioned hood (bonnet!) of this metaphorical car, that I’ve been barking up at least one wrong tree. I feel a bit foolish, but in research, being wrong isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as we learn from our mistakes and missteps. My real challenge now is documenting what went wrong, and why I think it peeled off the rails. That’s what my next post (or posts) will be about. Also coming up will possibly be a flash fiction entry spurred by Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds blog. If you’re not reading him, you should be. I’ll add him to my blogroll linkist whatever the heck that … Read on! →

That’s a seriously big screen.

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Man, a blank wiki is daunting. It’s worse than a single blank page, it’s a million blank pages. They’re not serial, or linear. They’re just one big connected open space of emptiness. There’s a reason I’m keeping the locks down on it for now. For starters, it’s hideously empty. The only way to change that will be through work. Which is fine. The other reason is that I want to have the space to just blather and throw stuff around. Some things will stick, and some things, in retrospect, will look like I must have been waking from a very strange dream involving eulogized lemons for me to have those ideas. I do like the interconnectedness and immediacy of a wiki, though. Have a new idea? Make a link, fill that out when you’re done with this page. Everything all scattered around? Add category tags. Sorted. Changes get tracked, comparisons … Read on! →