Decision Making Paradigm re-evaluated.

 

So while I had hoped that I was done writing about friendships it turns out I am not. 

Time to re-evaluate my decision-making paradigm...

Rita Mae Brown, in her 1983 book "Sudden Death" wrote, "Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.'”

When the fall is all there is...

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is from "The Lion in Winter" (1968) (and 2003 for that matter...) when Geoffrey, Richard, and John are in the dungeon waiting on the king to come for them. They have a little back and forth and Richard is going on about how he is going to meet his death. There is an interchange between them that I really like a lot. It goes like this:

Richard: He'll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn't going to see me beg.

Geoffrey: Why you chivalric fool—as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

The Inner Light

 

I recently watched the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light" (Season 5 episode 25). This is far from the first time as it is one of my very favorites from the series. This time however it started me thinking and if you know me at all there are only two possible outcomes of my thinking: Very BAD things happen or very PROFOUND things happen. I guess you will need to read on to see which it was this time...

Short Fiction, the Internet, and Everything.

I have been reading what you would call short fiction since I was very young (is there anything that more epitomizes short fiction than a Little Golden Book?)  and I was probably 9 or 10 years old when I got my first magazine. I am reasonably sure it was a copy of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine; I still have a couple issues from back then, though not all of the ones I read by any means.

To have lived through some of the heydays of fantasy and sci-fi short fiction and the magazine boom only to then to see it falter, almost disappear completely, and then start to recover was an interesting experience.

Out In The World

Every day on my way to work and then back home from work I see people out in the world.

They look like they are having fun, doing things, living lives. 

Changing Sentiment

When I was a kid a bookstore was a magical place. A holy place. Full of action and adventure, science, and imagination.

Every trip to one of my local bookstores was something I looked forward to like a vacation.

Is a writer still a writer if he isn't writing?

For the last year or so (if I'm honest, nearly two years now) writing has been far more difficult than it should be. By writing, I mean anything that requires putting words in a cunning order. Be that blog posts, letters, novels, or really anything. I managed to complete NaNoWriMo 2017, but it was torture and well, quite poorly written. For NaNoWriMo 2018 I never got past 14k words. 

I have always considered myself a writer, not because I had published anything or because I was always writing something, but because I loved writing. Whenever the opportunity presented itself I would write happily away into the night. whether it was instructions on some process or system for work, a letter to someone, a short story, a blog post, or anything the words just poured out (not always good, but easily). This is no longer the case.