Tag: authors

Vacationing in the Mushroom Kingdom

Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?

I would love to tour the Mushroom Kingdom, the world of Super Mario Bros. Strolling through a valley of giant mushrooms, snoozing on the sunny beaches of Gelato Beach, relaxing in Flower Fields … Such a vast, detailed world of make-believe to enjoy.

The folks are friendly, the sites are beautiful, it’s a fairly safe place all around, and the jerks and villains that do exist get beaten up by a pair of heroic Italian plumbers. Not bad, all in all. As long as I stay way from shady places like the land ruled by that nasty big turtle King Bowser, I think I’d do alright in the Mushroom Kingdom.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.


Read, Read, Read

There are things that school can’t prepare you for. There are challenges that no lesson you’ve learned will make you ready to face. There are everyday struggles that are mere myths in childhood and imposing realities in adulthood.

Schools don’t teach everything. They’re meant to prepare kids to thrive in life, but schools are remiss in important things, like how to budget money or how to replace a flat tire. Practical things, things that we end up learning through other means. That we all too often end up having to learn on our own.

Isn’t it amazing, then, that we live in a world where such information is so readily available? In the second it takes you to pull out your phone, thousands of years of knowledge is at your service. We carry around the weight of history in our pockets. We can read. We can read everything. How to take care of your car, how to fix your computer, how to paint your bedroom, how to fix a broken chair. So much knowledge, so much teaching, and we barely have to look very hard for it. We just have to be willing to read.

Say what you will about misinformation and gossip online, but facts, the useful kind, are just as easily found. So read. Read everything. If in doubt about how to cook a meal, read about it online. Curious about the history of the city you live in? Read up on that, too. Read, read, read.

And if you’re concerned about possible misinformation, then read about the same subject in different sources. Use your head. Figure things out. We aren’t being kept in the dark as much as we might think. A lot is online, enough to make the Library of Alexandria look like the preschooler’s section at your local bookstore.

Don’t know what the Library of Alexandria is? Guess what? You can look that up right now!

And if you aren’t one for the Internet (although, seeing as how you’re reading this blog, well …), there are still plenty of options. Libraries, bookstores, garage sales, hole-in-the-wall shops. Books are still everywhere. Buy some, read them, learn, grow. Reading is learning. Learning is independence.

I’m completely biased in saying this. I’m a writer and reader. I love words. Though I grew up loving the tactile feel of a book in my hands, I recognize how useful the Internet is for learning stuff that isn’t just silly and random. There is so much to learn. So much of it can be found for free. You’d be surprised how much of it is just there. Not hidden, not obfuscated. It’s out there. We just have to be willing to look.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

How Writing a Novel is Like Cooking a Breakfast Scramble

Breakfast scrambles are really good, aren’t they? You cook upsome eggs, toss in some sausage, cheese, maybe green peppers, some onions and hashbrowns. Whatever’s lying around, whatever you’ve tried before that tasted good, gets thrown in the pan and mixed together. Delicious.

I’ve realized that writing a novel kind of works the same way. You take what you’ve learned from past writing attempts, all your successes in storytelling, your lessons in grammar and pacing, and then you throw in bits and pieces from your own life: Childhood memories, friends, strangers, events and images that left a lasting impression, a random trivia fact you read in a book five years ago. There are so many things I draw from for inspiration and guidance when writing. And I throw them onto the page together and voila! I have a novel.

Of course, breakfast scrambles don’t require revisions. Novels require more drafting and a bit more seasoning, if you will, then a one-and-done meal. But both work by combining disparate elements into a cohesive whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Both also involve a great deal more improvisation than one might expect. Indeed, for all my planning and forethought, I often find that writing is more chaotic than anything that occurs in the kitchen. Food is much more predictable than words. At least when you’re cooking an egg you know what the end result will be. Stories always surprise.

Better, I suppose, than the other way around.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

When’s the Last Time Anyone Used Cursive, Anyway?

What’s a skill you consider basic, that most people don’t actually know how to do?

Gather around, you young whippersnappers! Let me tell you what school was like back in my day! grumble grumble, dagnabbit …

I remember learning cursive in elementary school. “Fancy writing” that did serve a practical purpose despite how unintuitive and confusing it could be. Cursive allows one to write faster and more efficiently. The line of each letter flows into the next, creating a long string of interconnected symbols that aren’t slowed down by print writing’s need to lift the pencil and move it over to start the next letter.

It’s quite beautiful, actually, but cursive is hampered by a basic fact of modern life:

How often does anybody need pencil and paper anymore?

Typing is all the rage. Keyboard, smartphone, you name it. And those letters on the screen are in print, so how urgent is it to learn cursive? Do they even still teach it in schools nowadays? Well, you whippersnappers? Do they?

Truth be told, as basic and mandatory as cursive once was in my school days, it’s practical value was limited even then. I grew up in the dying days of cursive handwriting, and I certainly don’t use it anymore now. I could likely remember the forms if I was pressed to give a demonstration. Probably. Maybe.

Beautiful, but obsolete. Maybe in another ten years it will become a secret code of sorts. The kids won’t have a clue what you’re writing down in front of their eyes. It’ll be a whole new form of cipher. Faced with cursive letters, people will be at a loss to explain the strange, archaic glyphs. Hmm, that has possibilities …

Maybe the old can find a new purpose, after all.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

CDs Deceased, DVDs Done For

Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?

I miss CDs. I miss the days when my computer games were on CDs. I could go to the store and buy an oversized cardboard box that contained a small disc and maybe a booklet, then I went home and popped the CD in my computer. Those were the days.

I miss DVDs. I miss the excitement of the days when DVDs replaced videocassettes and all the possibilities that came with Digital Technology (!!). I miss DVD menus that had cast information and special features and documentaries in addition to the movie itself.

I miss the days when computers had CD and DVD ports. You slid the disc into a built-in player. Nowadays, you need a separate external player or you just stream things online.

More than anything, though, I miss owning my media. I miss having a tangible thing in my hand when I bought a movie or a video game. I miss my row of discs on a shelf and seeing what I own with my own eyes. Those days are gone. They’re just memories now. Should have recorded them on DVD.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Farewell to Cents

If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be?

Farewell, paper money. Farewell dollar bills. Farewell pennies and nickels. You were good friends, but your time is over. The credit card now rules supreme.

I regret the trend of cash payments dying off. Credit and debit cards are handy in a pinch, no doubt, and paying for things online is a tremendous convenience. I’m not playing the hypocrite here, I use my credit card regularly. But I miss the time when cashiers expected you to pay with cash.

Cash is safe. Swindlers can’t steal your personal info from a dollar bill. They can’t swipe your identity from a dime. Cash takes time to use, what with counting out the bills and fiddling with the coins, but it’s more secure.

“But, Jake,” you might say, “what about counterfeit money?” Well, what about credit card fraud? Counterfeit money is a risk, but at least it doesn’t hand over your social security number, address and bank account to a perilous stranger.

I also like the tangibility of paper money. I like things that I can hold in my hand and know are real. Credit is too easy to squander. Numbers on a screen, nothing more. No sobering reminder that spending credit is spending money. Paying a hundred dollars in cash carries much more weight than paying a hundred by card. You see the money fleeing before your very eyes.

There are places that don’t accept cash at all, now. I’m sure someday paper money won’t exist in any shape or form. Transactions will all be digital. Numbers scrolling by on a computer screen. A shame. I like bills and coins, but I imagine that when I’m old and gray, the only place I’ll see them is in a museum.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

When the Future Was a Distant Gleam

What’s something you used to believe as a kid that seems ridiculous now?

As a kid I never truly believed I would grow up and go to college. Silly, of course, to all us adults reading this post, but time is skewed for a child. A week seems like a year, a year is practically a lifetime. Ten years is an epoch away, all events therein as insignificant to a six-year-old as the dimming of a star in another galaxy is to a fish in the sea.

I didn’t think about the future as a kid. All those papers teachers made us write about where we saw ourselves in twenty years were strictly academic. I never really cared, even if I dreamed and boasted of what I’d be doing. A part of me never believed it would be real. It wasn’t real, not until I arrived on the college campus the weekend before my freshman year started.

Maybe that’s why college is such a big deal. Kindergarten, elementary school, high school – the days of childhood, when the real world is far off, something that exists only in textbooks and lectures. To be honest, college is no closer to the real world, but it was the time when I started seriously thinking about a future beyond education. I thought about getting a job, moving out of my parents’ house, living on my own. Kids don’t worry about those sorts of things.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Them Tasty Mushroom Burgers

What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?

How appropriate that as the U.S.A.’s July 4th celebration rapidly approaches, I put up a post about burgers.

Actually, not about burgers in general. Mushroom burgers, specifically, and how they changed my mind about mushrooms.

You see, as a kid, I hated mushrooms. I didn’t want anything to do with them, and they certainly shouldn’t go in my mouth. I, a boy whose age wasn’t even in the double digits, confidently declared that I wouldn’t eat a mushroom until I was 50 years old.

I didn’t last that long.

You see, from what I can recall, I gave in to the savory deliciousness of mushrooms around the time that my dad started taking me to the local Red Robin burger restaurant. It was a tradition. We’d go see the latest blockbuster on a Saturday morning, and afterwards we’d go to Red Robin for lunch. For some reason, one day I ordered the mushroom burger and realized that mushrooms are really, really tasty.

I like mushrooms now. I like them on sandwiches, I like them in salads, I like them every which way, because they are, in fact, not as bad as 8-year-old me thought they were. Which will teach 8-year-old me to make bold lifelong declarations before he has all the facts.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

In Praise of Reading

Reading is a truly wonderful invention. What do great writers of history have to say about it? Let’s find out.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Wisława Szymborska

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

E.B. White

And let us not forget these eternal words of wisdom from the novel Don Quixote:

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

A love of reading is the best sort of crazy (but do try to get plenty of sleep).

To Colonize the Red Planet

“I am going to colonize Mars!”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Because it’s there!”

“Yes, it is there. It’s very, very far over there.”

I don’t think we’ll ever colonize Mars. And being a stick-in-the-mud, I also feel the need to ask the question: Why?

We already have a perfectly habitable planet right here. And before anyone says anything about climate change, overpopulation, wars and various other sundry problems that plague the human species, let me remind you that Earth remains habitable without having to put on a space suit to walk outside, whereas Mars … doesn’t.

Besides, if we colonize Mars, who’s to say we won’t just bring said issues with us?

It doesn’t sound like a good time. Colonists would be living in sealed rooms for the rest of their lives. You can’t go outside and play. The solar radiation is deadly, the dust storms are deadly, the air is deadly and how long can you last before cabin fever sets in? Or you want to strangle your roommate who lives within a hundred feet of you every day?

The idea is romantic, I confess. A big, bold step for mankind, just like the moon landings were. But it seems … excessive. Indulgent. Something more suitable for speculative fiction. We haven’t even gotten around to colonizing the moon. Aren’t we skipping a step by making a beeline for Mars?

Or maybe sixty years from now, I’ll read this blog and laugh at my pessimism. But, for now, I say with confidence: We aren’t going to colonize Mars.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.