point of view

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Writer Fuel: You Can’t Go Back

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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: Mortality

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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Point of View: The Power of the Pen

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rainbow pen - deposit photos

Kim Fielding and I are hard at work on the sequel to Office of the Lost, and as yet to be named second romp through the Connected Worlds with our heroes Crispin and Leopold. In the scene I just completed, they find themselves on a world named Hades, where the very fabric of the place is made up of a substance that is contradictory in nature. They nickname this weird stuff Schrödinger’s cat because it seems to exist in two states at the same time. Sometimes it’s hot/cold, sometimes it’s black/white, sometimes it smells like cinnamon/garbage. It’s organized, intentional chaos. … Read more

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Point of View: Something’s Missing

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missing puzzle piece

I recently finished writing the second book in the River City Chronicles series, Down the River. Overall, I’m really happy with it – the storylines all wrapped up well, and the ending seemed perfect. Almost. Oh how I hate that word. Writing a novel is like putting together a 10,000 piece puzzle, blindfolded. Or maybe it’s like running in the dark, hoping not to hit anything, and trying your damndest to reach the finish line in perfect form by the deadline. I’d been careful to wrap up each of the major character’s storylines, and to spill all the secrets by … Read more

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Point of View: Diving Into the Past

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time travel - hands and clocks - deposit photos

You reach a certain point in your life, and the years you have behind you start to number more than the years you probably have left. This leads to introspection, and I am no exception to that rule. In recent days, I have found myself reflecting on my past a lot. No particular timeframe, just little memories that keep coming up in my mind. It may be because Mark and I have just started reading a new book in Italian by a fairly well-known author. We’ve previously read two of his fictional works, but this one is an autobiography. We’ve … Read more

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Point of View – The Copyright Jungle

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copyright - deposit photos

The recent Anthropic AI settlement has me thinking a lot about copyright. I’m in the US, and we can register our works with the US copyright office. It’s not hugely expensive – about $45 if you do it before publication and $65 if you do it after the fact. But US copyright law also says that if you indicate that a work is copyrighted – by including a copyright page – then you are covered by copyright protections without having to formally register. So it’s not always been necessary to do the paid registration to enjoy copyright protection in the … Read more