Police tickets

Yesterday I bought tickets to see The Police when they come here in July.  I was like 10 when they broke up, and I love their music so this is a big deal for me.  I nabbed an extra pair of tickets for my buddy Harold.  He’s in Iraq at the moment, but he’ll be home by then and we’ll have a great time.  I mean, it’s the Police, come on.

By the by

Uno, the beagle that won the Westminster dog show, is Toby’s brother.  The family is very proud.

Opening lines…

Working on a new short story, here’s the opening lines.

I’m not exactly sure how to tell you my story.  It’s not like most.  Oh, it follows Aristotle’s arc of drama just fine.  There is a building story with a climactic point followed by some predictable aftermath where we all learn a lesson.  It’s fairly textbook in most regards.  Where it deviates from the norm is this:  I’m the villain.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m likable.  I suppose that you could argue that all the best villains are, but I’m especially likable.  I’m really a very nice person.  Except for, you know, killing people and drinking all of their blood.

To Be Clear

I’ve spoken about this before, but I just wanted everyone to be sure they understand.

Neil Gaiman is a god.

I just finished Stardust. I know, I know. It’s been out for awhile and there is a movie. Normally when a movie is based on a book I’ve read the book before I see the movie and I end up hating the poor adaptation. Books are just better. But this time I refrained from reading the book until I’d seen the movie. A few things have kept me busy and I’ve not had a chance to read the book until now. I loved it. Not my favorite Gaiman, but really quite wonderful.

One of the best Gaiman works is A Study In Emerald. It’s a cross between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft. Literally. It’s a Sherlock Holmes story set in a world in which “The Old Ones” are awake and among us.

You can read or listen to it for free, but it’s a part of Fragile Things and if you like this story, you should buy the book. Then buy all his books. You’ll love them.

Look! A clue!

My sister who lives in Pennsylvania has been visiting the past couple of weeks.  It’s been really good to have to family all hang out together.  With a minimum of fighting this time, which is extra nice.  We all love each other and get along, but we’ve all grown into our own selves and in some ways we’ve grown apart.  But that’s part of life.  Things are always changing and moving on.  That we all had a good time visiting and catching up and hanging out, that’s important and it means we’re still family.

My sister brought her tow sons with her.  Joseph is 3 and Andrew is 2 months.  This visit was the first time all of us but my mother have seen Andrew.  And Joseph is almost a new person each time we see him, he grows so fast. Right now Joseph is into (among other things (especially trains)) Scooby Doo.  We had a lot of fun playing hide and seek with flashlights and saying things like “Jinkies” and “Look!  A clue!”.  Andrew is into eating and sleeping, but I’m sure that his interests will expand over time.  (Until the teen years, at which point he’ll revert back to only eating and sleeping.)

Autumn at last

I love Autumn.  It is the absolute best time of the year.  Halloween is fun, and Thanksgiving is the best holiday ever.  I love how all the family gets together and we make amazing food and have a wonderful time just enjoying each others company without all the insanity (and frankly all the crap we put each other through) that comes with Christmas.  I love Thanksgiving so much I have it twice a year.  Once in November and once in, oh about May.   The weather seems to be surrendering finally.  It was a really hot summer here.  I acclimated to it alright, but my lawn thought I was watering it with a flame thrower.

A good friend of mine and I started playing racquetball again.  I’m not as agile as I used to be, but it’s a great workout and a fun game.  I highly recommend it.

Also, for those of you who like to tell people you meet at parties that you are a writer, your submissions for Clarion at UCSD will be accepted from January 2 to March 1, 2008.  Now, if you’re at all like me, you pretend to do things over the holidays, but you really don’t do anything but eat and drink and hang out with all your friends and family.  So you should be working on your short stories NOW.  I mean, come on people.  Neil Gaiman is going to be there.  We’ve got to start taking this seriously. 

OK, I know that was aimed at myself and I feel chastised now.  I’ll get to work finishing that short story.

~Akanthos

Like a Phoenix rising needs a holy tree. Like the sweet revenge of a bitter enemy. I need your love

The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills

What that means is that the greater Pattern of life has it’s own design and we just have to learn to ride it.

Robert Jordan passed away yesterday, of a rare blood disease. The author of the Wheel of Time series was 58. It looks like from the rumors floating around WoT fan sites that he spent the last few months working on the long awaited book 12, as well as dictating all the notes anyone would need to finish the book should he die. Now that he has passed on, we’ll have to wait and see how things work out.

If the work is handed to another author, who would you like to see finish the series?

I have too many thoughts

The funny things is that I never have them while I’m sitting at a computer wondering what to post.

In the mean time, let me tell you about Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. The first Gaiman book I read was American Gods, which took me all of 24 hours to consume. (If that) The next tasty morsel was Neverwhere, a wonderful modern fairy-tale set in London and London Below. (”Below what?”, you might ask. London, duh. Read the book.) I held off reading Stardust until after I saw the movie. (My friend had never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when the movies where coming out, he decided to wait until after to read them since we all usually love the book way more than the movie. So this way he enjoyed the movies without feeling like they ruined it.)

And just today (at about 2am) I finished Neuromancer by William Gibson. You know how some people have managed to go through life without seeing some iconic movie, like Star Wars, and we all think that while they deny it they must be Amish? Not having read Neuromancer and liking Sci-FI books is kind of like that. It was great. I can only imagine what reading it when it first came out was like. Technology has caught up to it in a lot of ways. It’s even surpassed it in others. The size of Case’s deck (PC) seemed large to me. And the need to physically ‘jack in’ every time they wanted to access the Matrix was kind of funny. (As I write this from my laptop jacked in to nothing at all.)

I have to admit, that Neuromancer was not the first Gibson book I’ve read. I started with Pattern Recognition, which is a great look at emerging trends, patterns, and some cyber sleuthing. Next up is Spook Country.

On an unrelated note, I was having lunch with a friend and RSS feeds came up. I used to use Sage, which is a very light-weight Firefox extension, but I would read feeds on 3+ different computers and keeping the read history synced was tedious. I now use Google Reader (which I love). If you read any kind of RSS feeds, the I highly recommend you try it out. Since it’s web based you don’t have to uninstall your current RSS aggregator. Just try it for a week and you’ll see how clean and wonderful it is. The drawback used to be that it’s a web app so you can’t read off-line, but it is a Google Gears compliant app so the answer is now, “Sure, read off-line all you want.” For more Google Gears info, go here.

~ Akanthos

Men go crazy in congregations but they only get better one by one.

Godspeed my brother

Today one of my best friends is leaving. He’s going to Texas for two months of training and then he’s heading to Iraq for a year. Needless to say we’re worried about him. All politics aside, I sincerely hope for a swift and peaceful end to the conflicts in the Middle-East.

As one friend leaves and others are more and more busy with their own families and lives, I’m deeply saddened that things will never be the same. However, I know that even though the nature of friendship can change over time and distance, it doesn’t have to lose it’s strength and power. Over the years I credit the influence of my friends with saving my life on many occasions. To me, regardless of time and distance, we will always have a bond. We’ll always be family.

In the book Magician by Raymond E. Feist, a group of friends meets just before leaving for a journey that ends up separating them for 10 years. The character Roland raises his cup and toasts to Friendship. They all toast and make this solemn pledge, that I now make to you my friends:

No matter where we go, no matter how many years pass, never again shall we be without friends.

Godspeed, my brother.

Twitter: A lazy mans blog?

Take a few moments and go to Twitter.  It’s kind of like a blog, but really really short.  The idea is that thousands of people all over the world are answering this one simple question:  What are you doing?  If you don’t have time for a blog, but want to have your own space to comment on whatever, this is pretty cool.