Selfish Humans Can’t Seem to Comprehend: It’s Their Habitat Too
“I didn’t exactly choose the ‘I prefer animals over people’ lifestyle. I just met enough people to realize the animals were winning.” This meme from social media pretty much sums up the past few months of my semi-rural life in southern New Mexico, not to mention it’s an ongoing theme woven throughout my Other Worldly […]
Willful Stupidity Is Watching Fox News 24/7
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” So said Benjamin Franklin. On that very subject, a social media post seen today depicted a sign that said: IF YOU DON’T HATE TRUMP AFTER THIS 18 MONTH SHIT SHOW, YOUR COMMITMENT TO STUPIDITY IS IMPRESSIVE. And then there was a cartoon […]
Days of Wine Grapes and Writing Gaps
I spent a sunny and sometimes sweltering Friday morning last week doing something never done before, picking grapes for winemaking at a neighbor’s place a few blocks away. For the past year, I’d watched the vines of Cabernet Sauvignon, Mission, Merlot, and Sangiovese (the latter depicted in the accompanying photo) grow and ripen in anticipation […]
Authoring or Attorneying? No Contest
During this very week in late July is when the opening scene in Alienable Rights, my first Other Worldly (OW) novel, takes place. Wherein Rowan Layne walks out into bright sunshine in Reno—and paranoid gun-crazed pandemonium—over breaking news that aliens are among us, and we might be aliens ourselves. In that novel, published February 2020, […]
Roswell: One of Myriad Local Crashes in July 1947
It’s July, and in southern New Mexico that means two things. Monsoon season, as in lots of thunder and lightning that doesn’t always include rain, which is actually related to the second thing, folks revisiting the Roswell Crash of 1947. Every year in proximity to the Fourth of July, the town of Roswell (113 miles […]
Anyone Else Detest the Dreaded Comparable Titles Request?
Yesterday I got a wild writing hair and polished off chapter 53 with Rowan Layne once again visiting Loch Ness in my eighth Other Worldly novel, Alien Origins. It turned out be a tad humorous, which makes me feel pretty good about my ability to maintain somewhat of a sense of humor in the insane […]
Celebrating Young Friendship Amidst an Old Experiment
This post is about maintaining hope and positivity in an 250-year-old experiment known as the United States of America, and it is dedicated to a fairly new friend, though it feels as if I’ve known her for decades. Eileen and I met one year ago later this month at a local Otero County function for […]
Maintaining Snark Ability Amidst Morale-Busting Insanity
Seen on social media recently: Shoutout to libraries for keeping fiction and nonfiction separate, that is not easy to do these days. Ya think? Try writing snarky sociopolitical speculative fiction that doesn’t make you crazy, even though it’s usually cathartic. Fact is, it’s been difficult to focus while navigating a world run by maniacal maniacs […]
In Defense of Spielberg’s Disclosure Day
It has been years since I saw a movie in the theatre. But Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, premiering earlier this month, was a must see because it’s about aliens among us. And while there are apparently far too many moviegoers who are heedlessly and haplessly bashing this blockbuster, I have a different take entirely. Did […]
It’s Personal: Childhood Memories of John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
When you grow up eight miles from the White House and roughly six miles from the famed Kennedy Center, things can tend to get personal when cretins screw with cherished childhood memories. In my Other Worldly novels, I’ve actually included the desecration of the rose garden in the first four years of a crook and […]