Interead thinks to put out a little competition for the Kindle with their new COOL-ER. It’s small, easy to read, and slick. Oh, did I mention cheap?

When it comes to topics like freedom, free speech, and protection of creative works (i.e. copyright), there is plenty of emotional outburst available. None of these topics are black and white. None of them are as simple as yes or no. None of them can be answered with child-like tantrums and emotional appeal. What is lacking is rational debate–the ability to consider all facets.

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Last night, I wrote 2K on Twinergy.

Twinergy is my new mainstream fic about two eleven year old twins–both geniuses–who start a new life after being caught by the FBI for stealing credit card data from black market sites and then selling it back to them. Now the two home boys who lived without parents for three years will have to adapt to yuppie life with their new white parents and personal surveillance officer.

Is it awesome? No. Is it writing? Yes! And lots of it. That’s phenominal, considering my word count since last November rivals last night’s output. So here’s chapter one (in the raw) for your perusal…

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I realize you haven’t heard a great deal from me lately. That’s mostly because I’ve been drowning under a mountain of work, partially because I’ve had commitments to fulfill, and mostly because I’ve been too exhausted to think.

I’ve decided it’s well and about time I reclaimed a small portion of my life for me. I’ve shaken things up around here pretty well, including the schedules of everyone in my hub of influence.

Beyond re-devoting my mornings to writing, I’ve also decided to devote an hour in the evenings to journaling the events of my day. I frequently regret not recording technical discoveries, writing ideas, and lessons-learned from gardening endeavors.

I’ll default to posting these rough ideas privately to my blog, but anticipate that many will be developed into completed ideas for public consumption. Like my recent post about sowing from seed.

As of today, I’ll be devoting this blog entirely to fiction writing and martial arts discussion. I think the two are inseparable for my purposes, so together they stay.

I’ve started a new blog for all things technical. I’ll be updating the look and feel as soon as the main zenovations site is finished. In the mean time, I’ll slowly be migrating all my technical posts from 3 (yes three) different blogs into that one.

I’ll occasionally cross-post here about technical things of interest to writers, such as writing software, blog tools, and web sites of writerly interest.

I’ve also decided that, based on how little I recall of the lessons-learned from our very successful garden last year, that I am going to chronicle this years efforts in detail, as both a self-reference and a tool for others. That will take place on jenandmichael, our family photo site.

So, that’s right. I’m going to maintain three blogs, each with individual content. That might seem like a magnificent effort, but honestly, it’s a reduction in overhead. Right now I maintain several personal files about each project, as well as three private technical blogs, a writing journal, and a gardening notebook.

This will combine all of that into three common and specific blogs and allow much of the material to be shared with others as I deem worthy.

Oh yes, and I’m going to be in CC on saturdays doing crits again. See some of you there!

You don’t get to pick who you love, but you can pick how you ruin your life.

That’s the first line of a new screenplay I’m putting together. I don’t know what the deal is with screenplays, but I’ve thought up three of them in the last few months.

This pick a single genre stuff just isn’t going to do it for me. Guess I’ll be with the pseudonyms.

In the last year we’ve easily spent 4-5 man-months repairing this flaming retarded crapulent wastehole of sinking garbage. That’s at least half the time it would take to rewrite the junk heap from scratch. Would someone please burn out my ears with flaming magma shot out of a snail shell, so I don’t ever have to hear this question again.

In response to suggestions to add yet another patch to an outdated feature

It is not the critic who counts; Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; Who strives valiantly;

Who errs, and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; But who does actually strive to do the deeds; Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; Who spends himself in a worthy cause;

Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt

I’ve completed Under the White, which is surely one of my best stories to date with the possible exception of Left at Last Shadows.

It’s not the plot development I want, or the ratcheting tension I’d like to convey, but it’s clearly better than my prior attempts. And it ends well! (I know, odd indeed for a Wulfish work)

Check out the excerpt (above); for those of you who enjoy such things, I’ve posted it for critique on the Circle.

Air is optional.

I hear so much about how people “need” this and “need” that. So what is it that we really need as a person?

You might argue that, to survive, a person needs food, clothing, shelter, water, and air. But who needs to survive?

At first, I’m sure that question sounds absurd. Let’s try it this way: What is more important to you than your own survival? An ideal? A country? Your family? If your answer is nothing, you’ve ranked yourself beside the guppy in nature’s equivalency test, who gives birth to young and never thinks on them again–unless particularly hungry.

So what do you need? And where am I headed? Obviously not advocating that anybody stop breathing–some sort of oxygen strike. Although I have to admit, to my shame, that I have on occasion wished certain people would do just that.

What I want to challenge are our self imposed limitations. Those things we tell ourselves we can’t live without, like our house, job, or love interest. See, while these things may define our situation, they do not define our heart and inner composition.

Those are defined by our conviction and beliefs, the core of which are truth, honor, and faith.

I submit to you that these are the true things we cannot live without. Everything of this world can be taken from us, even air. So be it. Come what may.

Truth, honor, and faith are the three facets we must cling to. These are the things that comprise our inner identity–not our possessions and successes, thank God, though the world crams that lie in our faces day after day. 

Air is nice, and I’d be sad if it were gone. But I cannot be unsettled by a world that threatens my material composition.  I leave you with the immortal words of two great men who explored this truth so much more intimately and eloquently than I…

Letter to Admiral Son Ko-i:

My life is simple, my food is plain, and my quarters are uncluttered. In all things, I have sought clarity. I face the troubles and problems of life and death willingly. Virtue, integrity and courage are my priorities. I can be approached, but never pushed; befriended but never coerced; killed but never shamed.
Admiral Yi Sun-shin

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
       My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
      Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
      I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley

Reality burped when I woke up today. Or perhaps vomited…

IM keeps opening windows telling me so-and-so has “left the conversation” we weren’t having. Is this like the emacs therapist, trying to tell me I’m not communicating?

A software vendor assured me that a “feature” of their product was, in fact, intentional and not a bug. Then in the next sentence told me they’d change it. What is that? Designer humor?

My computer “forgets” every couple hours which keyboard layout I’m using. Unfortunately it doesn’t revert to the default but to one I’ve never used before, making for some interesting sente,.cpgaeoie’s.

I purchased a photoshop license, but photoshop says it’s a bad serial number when I type it in. (The license says it’s a bad photoshop.)

And the final kicker… When logging in to check the status of my return, Turbotax reports that I didn’t e-file my taxes. I do have a receipt for the “alleged” event that never occured; though, at this point in the day, I’m only moderately certain I didn’t forge it in an alternate reality.

Please tell me you have days like this and it’s not just me.