Periodically.org

So I hacked into the CSS for this erstwhile beautiful template to make it all my own. Decidely craptastic and the victim of a geek thinking he can make stuffs look nice. (here's a hint why that's bad, programmers designed Frontpage, as well as, I'm sure, not a few of the American Cars on the road today (honestly, Pontiac Aztec, you can't tell me that wasn't thrown together by a bunch of engineers from MIT after a power failure wiped out the amazing design the actual designers had spent months doing. It honestly looks like someone made a car out of one of those fudge chunks you see at fairs. Or, just as easily, those MOUNTAINS OF CHOCOLATE that used to be portrayed in the DQ commercials). But hey, I wanted to make this my own, so there you have it. I also bought the domain www.periodically.org , so now you can tell all your friends you read Periodically.org, not some random effusive ramblings of a writer wannabe who couldn't get Niteowl as a blogger URL so got TH...

There are many stages of The Writer. As far as I can tell, each level you get to seems more populated than the one before. It's like some perverse inverted pyramid of frustrated and aspiring scribblers. Here are the ones I can identify: 1) Denier This person reads like it's going out of style. Reads tons and tons and then maybe an ounce more. Has many opinions on books, writers, writing, etc. Mildly entertains the notion that he might, just might -- if push came to shove came to forcible coercion -- have a book in him. Refuses to entertain this possibility one iota further. 2) Acolyte Firmly believe that they can write. That maybe even writing is in the stars, tea leaves, or the droppings of a particularly prescient goat. Read tons. But now reads tons ABOUT writing, and ON writing (Orson Scott Card's "Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing" and Stephen King's "On Writing" are pretty darned good). Maybe subscribes to a wri ters editors / publishers / age...

You toil at the keyboard. Mashing the keyboard mercilessly; plotting, revealing character, spouting metaphors, crafting with all your writing ability to create readable fiction. Stuff that people would actually want to read. Not just stuff that coworkers and close friends feel compelled to cursorily glance through, nodding ever so slightly with a carefully crafted smile of 'enjoyment'Stuff that would entertain, and maybe even get a chuckle. Maybe someday, someday it'll see print. Then a cryptic email from the Ubyssey yesterday, something along the lines of 'we were able to fit everything in'. My heart leapt. Could it mean that my Space Cowboy piece would actually be published in a real live (student) paper?! That was pretty darned exciting. Sure, I've made my way into the department newsletters, which was pretty cool, but this is the first time my fiction had seen print. On the other hand, they were printing absolutely everything. It wasn't like there was...

So I just cleaned up a few of the blogs I was linking to since, apparently, they weren't linking to me. The buggers! I mean, that's ok. One of them is a highly traffic IP law blog run by a friend of mine. And the other is a Guild Wars thing. Either way, I can't imagine most people were clicking over there anyhoo. And when I say friend, I mean friend I've met over the internets. Because that's what we geeks do. Find people to prattle endlessly to over the net. And then we listen to them prattle to us. Invariably, we are of the same opinion. And if we're not, then graphs, polemics, counterpoints and ripostes are issued. Links, references, footnotes and maybe a few quasi experts are put into play, should it come to that. But I digress. Other news! The short fiction piece I submitted to the Ubyssey (student UBC newspaper) Sci Fi Contest didn't make the cut. Oh well. I imagine they got a metric ton of submissions. Maybe mine was so blazingly brilliant they didn...

Man, you really do learn a new thing everyday. There have been a few shocking realizations I've had over the past month or so: -bizaare is spelled bizarre (how bizaare) -scythe is pronounced "sithe", not the phonetic way. Which is the way I've been pronouncing it in my head for my whole life. My entire youth spent reading Advanced Thresher Sci-Fi and Buckwheat Fantasy novels, for naught! -George Eliot was a woman, real name Mary Ann Evans. -Terry Gilliam is American. -Robocop is a Criterion Film. I shit you not . -Uhm, oh damn, just after I post this, I find that, this movie is a Criterion film as well . Maybe I don't know what being a Criterion film really entails.. Alright all (three) readers of my blog, post and lemme know some earth shattering facts you've learned recently.

The following is short story I wrote for a contest. A piddling tiny contest that I'm sure to get a nice rejection letter from. But hey, it's the effort that counts goldurnit. It's actually a heavily heavily heavily modified excerpt from the latest novel I'm working on "Hayden Smith : Sardonic Space Cowboy". It's about a guy who works for The Beta Bank corporation. But only a few Earthlings even know that "They" are out there. "They" being space creatures and aliens and all that good pulp sci-fi stuff. It's kinda James Bond meets Men In Black crosses Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Kind of. Except less mysterious, less funny, and less actiony. The worst of all possible worlds, really. Anyhoo, hope you enjoy it. Hayden Smith, Sardonic Space Cowboy The bomb had a nice display: green and black with a thin blue border. Hayden wasn't positive -- alien languages were indecipherable, by definition -- but he suspected it was count...

Following is a short story I wrote riffed from my buddy Andy's office issues.

Yes, I'm lazy. Sorry for the lack of updates! I've just finished going through my final major revision/edit of "Dance Panda Dance", my first novel. Working on the start of my third novel, "Hayden Smith, Sardonic Space Cowboy". So I'm a bit busy. Here, for your edification, and hopefully amusement, is an article I wrote for my work's Spring newsletter: Spring has sprung! Like so many things that tend to spring! Wonderful children's toys, Tigger of Disney fame, and well laid, highly lethal booby traps. Commercials persuade us that spring brings sunny days and fanciful frolics among the flowers. For those of us used to West Coast weather, we know spring only brings rain that's slightly less freezing than winter rain. Instead of freezing immediately on our Gore-Tex™, it may linger a while, as super-cold flu-inducing wet, and _then_ freezing. For this we should rejoice! Rejoice and pile into our nearest retailer to buy consumer goods in the lat...