All you have to do is scan YouTube comments and you see the ubiquitous “Wow, that girl is so talented.” What’s wrong with that comment? Talent is invisible. There’s no way to tell from a musical end product how much the performer’s natural talent has contributed to that product. What the commentator is really saying […]
A lot of movies and stories have a guru or mentor character, Yoda of course being one of the stellar examples. The way Empire Strikes Back introduced Yoda was stellar: at first Luke thinks he is just a pesky, barely sentient Dagoba life form and he turns out to be the celebrated Jedi master. In […]
Friendship is a tricky thing for any kind of mentor or instructor. I strive to get to know my students as people. My job gives me a privileged one-on-one window into the lives of a very broad cross-section of people. I teach homeschooled kids, adults having a mid-life crisis, teens transitioning to college, kindergartners, retired folks. It’s […]
I’ve written in a prior blog that the *feel* of Lovecraft’s mythos (though none of his concrete details) was a huge influence on the world of my fantasy novel Siana’s War. But I added to that mythos a most un-Lovecraftian thing: a female protagonist, who has pluck, sass and a penchant for swear words. She […]
Is it cheating to use visual aids for writing? Absolutely not…a solid analogue being artists using live models to get correct anatomical proportions and realistic foreshortening. Here are three quick examples of my use of such aids in the writing of Siana’s War: I’ve had the character of Twilight, acrobatic warrior, kicking around in my head […]
There are lots of writing workshops about crafting a plot. Protagonists, nemeses, crises, moments of revelation and choice – and overall story arcs – are discussed. For better or worse, I didn’t think of any of those principles consciously when I began the task in late 2003 of turning a childhood short story into what […]
Trying to manage a 600,000-word novel series definitely compelled me to check out a variety of writing tools. What I found was no one program did it all (despite the claims). I ended up patching together a lot of individual softwares to make a sort of Mega-Program. And this works well….just leave all the tabs […]
This is an “old” blog (circa 2003)….an article I wrote for the Issaquah Alps Trails Club newsletter and never used! But it makes perfect sense today, still: In my job, I have a lot of contact with junior high and high school youth. Several have interviewed me, with regard to my role as Trail […]
This is the first post in my newest blog category, Getting Stuff Done. For each category in my website, I’ve started with an apologia: what is my authority to talk on this subject? In this case, I’ve been called: “The busiest person I know.” “A closer.” “The most organized person I’ve met.” I can’t credit […]
In 2000 I published my version of the Cougar Mountain guidebook. I recently reread my Afterword. I was already thinking it was worth re-posting some of my late 90’s-early 00’s musings about trails here in the blog. There’s no better start than that Afterword in its entirety: “…I must frame an apology (using that word in the […]