• A Road Long Traveled

    It was the fall of 1988. It was my first year of college and I was living on campus, hanging out with a group of occultists, and locked into a challenging relationship with a member of Campus Crusade for Christ. To say it was a confusing time would not be an understatement. It was a

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  • A few important things to know about rock candy: It might be the earliest form of candy, with records of it appearing around 2,000 years ago. It’s pure sugar (with a pinch of food coloring)—if Pixie Sticks are the cocaine of the candy world, rock candy is the crack cocaine. It has a string in

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  • Step up off my kimono, dude.

    *Amended after a bit of reflection and a few off-line conversations to help clarify. Thanks for your patience.*   I had the good fortune this morning to be feeling guilty over a long gap in blog posts while in the company of my friend and fellow writer Nicole Feldringer. She knows that I’m one of

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  • Theme Parking Lot

    In my experience, a lot of English Lit teachers will talk about THEME like it’s this big hammer that the author uses to bludgeon a point home. I was always vaguely suspicious about that. For a while, I maintained that theme was something that people who didn’t write used to make sense out of things

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  • I like to think from time to time that there has to be a good chocolate & cherry candy out there somewhere. The two flavors work really well together in theory. I get a cherry mocha at the Wayward once and a while, and the Cherry Garcia Ice Cream from Ben & Jerry’s is pretty

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  • I found myself in need of a notebook and pen after work yesterday. This happens from time to time and has led to stockpiles of barely-used notebooks spread among my shelves and various book bags. It’s a sickness. I know. So there I was at Bartell’s, a bit giddy in my favorite aisle of any

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  • I feel the need to start off by saying that I love Joss Whedon and his work. I feel he has done more to broaden the kinds of characters/heroes we can expect to see on TV and now in movies than most people working in the industry. I applaud him for that. The trouble is

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  • Reinventing Thor

    What if Thor was a Blaxploitation character in the mid-70’s? My brain asks these questions some times. Oftentimes, they turn into stories. In this case, I was contemplating the Cobalt City Timeslip anthology Timid Pirate Publishing was putting together. We had stories ranging from the early pre-history of the area up to modern, but no

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  • Family Histories

    The last time we talked, it was mid-June, so it has certainly been a while. Time for an update, wouldn’t you think? I mean, I could fill you in on the writing I’ve been doing either in the abstract (yay, stuff published!), or the specific (here’s what was going on in my head when I

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  • As I start this post, I’m about ten minutes away from 2am. I tried to sleep. I really did. I can’t do it, somehow. For reasons I can’t really explain, I’m utter shit at sleeping lately. I’ll have a few successive nights of four hours or so, maybe less, then I’ll collapse from exhaustion and

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