Author: Joseph Carrabis

A Twelfth of Carrabis (Jan 2025 Newsletter)


It is January and soon I will celebrate another turn around the sun, and a teeny, tiny bit of a turn around the galactic core, so slight a movement in comparison mathematicians wouldn’t even consider it a differential. Should you live free of light pollution, take a gaze skyward any night that’s full of stars. The hazy object running through the celestial equator is our galaxy, the Milky Way, what some cultures call The Great River (want a thrill? Ask Dharghie if she’ll let DingoMan take you for a ride in his canoe), others The Blue Path, and still others The Ancestors’ Fire.

Look along that haze until you see a slight bulge, a quiet brightness in the direction of Sagittarius. That is the Milky Way’s center, our galactic center, and what astronomers call its barycenter, the “point” around which our galaxy rotates.

It is also where we – us, all other life on our planet, our neighbor planets, our sun, all other galactic suns and their planets, nebulae, and all else – come from. It is our birthplace years ago beyond counting, and I long to return home.

PS) You can read more about different cultures’ celestial stories in The Shaman.

I mentioned last month these newsletters’ new formatting is thanks to Sister Rika Chandra, who also wrote a wonderful author biography for me. Do reach out to her for help with such matters.

I’m still thinking of redoing my website and could use any suggestions you might have.
Continue reading “A Twelfth of Carrabis (Jan 2025 Newsletter)”

An Experiment in Writing – Part 15: Author Voice, Character Voice (Part 1)

This experiment starts a thread which looks to be three posts long.

So far, anyway.

My goal is to demonstrate that character voice – the way a character talks, the words they use, how they emphasize things, grammatical and linguistic quirks, … – reveal character, including any changes they’ve gone through as the story/novel progresses.

Author voice is similar to the above and covers the entire work, not individual characters. It is your brand, if you will, and how readers recognize your work as separate and distinct from others.

Let me know how good a job I’m doing. Feel free to ask me to elaborate. Currently I recognize this is one of those things I know and never had to explain to myself.

 
Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Get copies of my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, you can follow along, and I need the money.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 5 – O’ Brother Where Art Thou?

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 5 – O’ Brother Where Art Thou?

 
Commander Tom Knox sat on one side of a large oak conference table in Naval Station New York’s Reagan Boardroom. His duffel and backpack were on the seat and floor beside him. An athletically thin, middle-aged woman with thick, flowing, hip-length blonde hair sat across from him in a sharp black suit with lapel pins, a service patch he didn’t recognize, and neither a name tag nor an obvious place for one on her suit jacket. Two younger men, both sandy-haired, both clean shaven, both dressed as she sans the lapel pin, sat on either side of her with briefcases open on the table.

They stared into their open briefcases. She stared at him and he stared back. “What department are you with again?”

She ignored the question. “The San Jacinto is equipped with the latest Aegis, that’s correct, isn’t it?”

He looked down at the highly polished table top for a moment. “What’s on the ship’s manifest?”

The man on her left pulled a stapled, much handled report from his briefcase and slid across to Knox. It stopped right in front of him.

“You learn how to do that in school?”

The woman nodded at the paper without taking her eyes off him. “Is that the paper you submitted directly to the Joint Chiefs?”

He scanned his name under the title The Need for Confirmation of Objective Sans KeyHole, ALWYS, and Related Systems. “You reading other people’s mail again?”

“You subverted the Chain-of-Command on purpose?”

“You here to slap my hands?”

“Is your laptop available?”

He pulled it from his backpack. One of the woman’s aides reached across the table for it. “May I?”

“It’s government property. Go for it. For that matter, so am I. What do you want it for?”

The aide reached under the table to a network hub and ran a cable from the hub to the laptop. Tom could see the glare of the screen on the aide’s face as it came to life. The aide nodded at the woman and she nodded back without taking her eyes from Tom.

“You don’t blink much, do you, Miss…?”

“Are you familiar with MK-Ultra?”

Knox laughed.

The other aide slid paperwork and grainy black-and-white photos across the table to him. He glanced at them and laughed again. “These taken with Brownie Instamatics?”

“In all combat situations, there are certain combatants recognized as being able to tell where the enemy is, their number, their weaponry, whether a mission will succeed or fail, who will and won’t survive a mission, sometimes more. When these combatants are compromised or otherwise unavailable, missions suffer, people are lost.” She read where an aide pointed on his laptop screen. “You’ve met one or two during your career, correct?”

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Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Kits at the Tray

Each year (this video is from a while back) we sigh happily when our local mothers introduce us to their children.

Not sure if I ever shared this (human) anecdote:

I often walk Boo (our dog) past school bus stops and chat with the kids and parents.

One of the kids told me she wasn’t allowed to talk to me.

Concerned, I stopped her mother (we routinely wave at each other when driving past). I asked if I’d somehow offended her or her family, or if her kids felt threatened by me.

She was shocked and confused.

I explained.

She said she’d talk with her daughter, and added all the parents in the neighborhood tell their kids to go to our house if something happens and the parents aren’t around, or if the kids don’t feel safe.

It was my turn to be shocked. Susan and I never did anything to intentionally demonstrate that, and knowing we’re the “safe” house in the neighborhood is an immensely gratifying experience.

Seems raccoons agree.