Tag: About Me

Today, I am a man

In these pages find worlds to explore, creatures anxious to meet you. Take these gifts, these seeds, and grow.

It’s in the mid-1960s. I’m not ten years old. It’s Friday, noon. Every Friday noon my mother picks me up from school and we go out for lunch. Sometimes it’s Howdy BeefBurgers (long out of business), most often it’s the lunch counter at the Valley St. Plaza’s Woolworth’s. The lunch counter women know me, we show up so often. Mother gets to gossip, I get extra coleslaw. They know I like it and give me two scoops (I immortalized this lunch counter and these women in the “About the Cover” section of Reading Virtual Minds Volume III: Fair-Exchange and Social Networks). Once lunch is finished, we go grocery shopping at Champaign’s. Sometimes we go the S&H Greenstamp Redemption Center and mother has a separate bag of all her completed stamp books. Usually something for the house. Once she got me a recorder and I played it on the way home. Sometimes we go to the Rexall’s so Mother can get her medicines.

The Rexall’s has a section down aisle 5, near the middle. Books. Rows and rows of books. Magazines, too. I buy my first Doc Savage book here. Also Choice Cuts, The Dreaming Earth, countless others. Champaign’s has magazines and some books at the end of the medicine aisle. Not very good books. Not my kinds of books. I wonder if medicine and books are linked somehow.

I’m already hooked on books, on the magic of them. My sister, Sandra, got me started.

I also got hooked on books for another reason, a primal, almost primitive reason. I’ll get to that at the end of this journey. Bear with me.
Continue reading “Today, I am a man”

I got D. Liebered (and I enjoyed it!)

(it was fantasitical)

Urban Fantasy author D. Lieber interviewed me recently regarding magicks, characters, and books I’ve written.

 
Talk about fun!

Let’s start with this exchange:
Q: What kind of spell can I get for you (or your character) today?
Hmm…few ever offer me their magicks, usually they’re asking magicks of me. What magick would I be gifted with? Le Guin showed us that asking for a thing doesn’t put boundaries on how that thing is achieved.
I will ask that you weave a spell that lets all asking of magick to know all that happens for that magick to be, then giving them the choice of still asking or not. (wow, what a good piece of storyfodder, that!)

And it gets better.

I should also add that D. Lieber is an author after my own heart; “D. Lieber is an urban fantasy author who writes stories she wants to read.” so similar to my Twitter “I’ve decided to spend the rest of my life writing things I’d enjoy reading. Who knows? You might enjoy them, too.”

So give a read, let us know what you think, and thanks.

Morningsong’s in Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 3!

(and the editor loved it)

No, really, it’s true and nobody’s as amazed as I am!

You want to know the topper?

Receiving this email from Team Harvey Duckman:

By the way, just wanted to say how much I enjoyed “Morningsong”. In this role I get to read a heck of a lot and sometimes I think I become a bit desensitised and reading/editing becomes ‘the job’ rather than something I do for fun… but something about Morningsong really struck me. It’s a really powerful story. So thank you.

It’s nice to know the cynic in me hasn’t completely killed of all my humanity and occasionally something can still get through that reaches my soul 😉

 
Yeah, I’m liking it.

And lots of other fine authors are in HDP3 as well.

(subscribers may remember an earlier version of Morningsong

The Proper Way to Describe the Itsuro-Shegami Technique When Applied to Nipple Joints

Ain’t nothing better for a wayward nipple

 
Rahki World author Rennie St. James invited me to guest blog WRITING REALISTIC HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT SCENES and I did.

I did I did I did!

Can’t tell you how many versions I came up with.

No, actually I can because I revision everything – four.

Some of those early versions…a beautiful demonstration of not knowing what to write about. There were lots of ways to go at it. Do I write about my many years teaching hand-to-hand mixmaster beef loin braising techniques at the Academie du HaHa in Paranormal, France?

Probably too graphic for most readers. No.

Instead I went with how to write a combat scene such that the reader believes it.

Hope it worked.

Let Rennie and me know, okay?

And thanks.

“Writing Something Horrifying” now on TimothyBatesonAuthor.com

Psychologists and philosophers debate “horror” as a concept. Authors have it much easier. They want to give readers chills. They want to make readers nervous. Uncomfortable. They want readers to turn on all the lights, to check locks on the doors, to tuck their feet up under themselves so nothing can grab them from below, to check under the bed before getting under the covers, to look in their closets, to look at their loved ones suspiciously.

Remember last week I wrote “Why This Were Here, Now?” now on TimothyBatesonAuthor.com?

Remember that amazing post?

You’d think he’d learn, ya know?

Well, he asked me to do it again. Or something similar.

This week’s theme is horror and I thought he wanted something horribly written.

No, he assured me. That wouldn’t prove a challenge for me.

He’d much rather I write something about crafting horror.

Hopefully I did, and hopefully it’s not too horrible.

Give Writing Something Horrifying. Leave a comment or two. He’ll like that.

And thanks.