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Point of View: Cocooning

cocooning - deposit photos

We started off 2026 with great hopes. Maybe this year would be different. Maybe things would finally start to change again, for the better. And then… Venezuela. And then… Renee Good. With this current administration, it’s always a new outrage, a new spectacle, always a new something horrible shoved in your face, each one more awful than the last. And so I am cocooning. I am spending the time I used to spend doomscrolling the news reading books instead. I am taking that space that he has been occupying in my brain for the last year, and allocating it instead … Read more

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Point of View: SacAnime!

Liminal Fiction at SacAnime Winter 2026

We just wrapped SacAnime 2-26 and we had a blast. New this year – bingo cards for common anime con sights – giant weapon, character carrying their own head, Deadpool, and much more. Sharing some photos from this fun event:

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Point of View: Kempt

kempt

I’ve always liked collecting words, and one of those collections is words that don’t have an opposite equivalent, or have one that’s rarely used or with a different meaning: So today I’m offering you a little something different. Enjoy my little mm flash-fiction romance featuring the opposites of these words: Cameron had always dressed peccably – a shabby t-shirt, rumpled cargo shorts, and flip flops. But that day, when he strode into the room chalantly, every eve followed him. He looked so kempt, so put together, and he crossed the room in a reckfull manner, carefully navigating the crowd to … Read more

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Writer Fuel: You Can’t Go Back

pearl - deposit photos

We got a good lesson this week in “you can’t go back.“ Twenty years ago, we first visited Portland and its shiny new district, the Pearl. It was built in an area that used to be an industrial wasteland, one of the blighted areas near downtown Portland. It started out with a conversion of a couple old single story brick warehouses into condos, with the cement loading docks serving as their front patios. Portland had some very smart urban zoning policies, including forcing developers to include storefronts / windows on the ground floors of all buildings, encouraging public art, and … Read more

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Point of View: Why We Do This

sadness - deposit photos

Every now and then, I sit back and reflect on what it means to be a writer in this crazy world we live in. There are so many of us now, especially with the advent of self-publishing technology. And with the arrival of AI, many of us expect to eventually be snowed under entirely. Every day as an author is an exercise in shouting into the cold, uncaring void, and hoping, every once-and-a-while, to hear a friendly “Hello?” back from the other side. We writers wrap ourselves up in blankets in our chilly, lonely writer caves and painstakingly extract stories … Read more

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Point of View: Mortality

calvin hobbes

I’m fifty-seven years old, verging on fifty-eight, and I just got some unwelcome news. My PSA level (prostate-specific antigen) is a bit high. Not four-alarm-fire high, but that together with the fact that I’m Caucasian (higher risk) and that my Dad and my Uncle Dave (his brother) both had prostate cancer at this age means that I’m headed to the Urologist for a biopsy. And yeah, even if I have it, this is one of the most survivable cancers. And it’s far from a certainty that I do. But nevertheless, it’s a sobering reality check. I am reaching the age … Read more

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Point of View: The Weight of Worlds

man holding world - deposit photos

The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Well, technically, three worlds. I’m currently writing three different novels, complete with three different universes of people. And sometimes it weighs on me as a writer to have to be the only person who knows about this world. To be responsible for everything: The people, the society, the religion, the economy, even the fricking plumbing. And as writers, we have to keep it all straight in our head somehow. And yeah, I have a story Bible for each of these worlds, but even that is a daunting task – maintaining it, … Read more

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Point of View: Wait, There’s a Zone?

fog - deposit photos

It’s so hard to get into the writing zone these days. I have three active novels, I’m working on and two other short stories I need to complete by March. So there’s plenty to do. Nevertheless, our politics hangs over everything like a miasma, a thick black smoke that chokes out almost everything else. I try to block it out. I do my best not to let it own my life. But it’s always there, lurking in the background, seeping into everything. And in this new world of inflationary pressure and “artificial intelligence” and corporations hell bent on extracting every … Read more

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Point of View: Wanting to Be Big

giant shadow - deposit photos

I’ve been writing seriously now for over eleven years. As regular readers of this column will know, I’ve climbed a long ways up Writer Mountain, but not as far as I hoped I would. Still, I haven’t done badly. And yet… I had a few things happen this last week that brought me down a peg. First of all, I was going to be a featured author at an event next year. Or at least thought I was, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out. There are a few reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that I’m … Read more

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Point of View: The Big Joy of Small Pride Festivals

This last weekend, we attended our final Pride of the season. Tri-County Diversity’s Pride in the Park is a small Pride up in Yuba City that serves the Northern Central Valley’s queer community. This is our first time doing the event. They had been after us for a couple years to come up from Sac Town – about an hour’s drive north. We finally said yes this year when our calendar allowed for it, and had no idea what to expect. And when I say we, I mean our Queer Sacramento Authors Collective (QSAC) group. Seven of us came to … Read more