I like books.

I like nice pens and I like nice notebooks.  They all go together in my mind. I really like to use Moleskine notebooks for my running-around-all-over-hell notebook.  If you’ve not seen one, then ask me next time you see me.  I always have one on me.  You can also check out their website.

I recently uncovered some of the fountain pens I brought from England.  I cleaned them up and I’ve been using my Parker 25 as my everyday pen for the last two weeks.  I’m trying really hard to remember why I stopped using fountain pens, they are a joy to write with.  When you find yourself in downtown Salt Lake City, head over to Trolley Square and the inkophiles over at Tabula Rasa and ask them to show you some fountain pens.  These people are just as passionate about paper, pens and ink as you can get.  I love buying a product from people who obviously love what they sell.

So I was at a conference for work today and as part of one of the sessions they had some info on doing fly-alongs with Air-Med, the medical chopper for the University of Utah hospital. I was able to go through the fly-along orientation and sign up to possible fly with them sometime soon. They even landed one of the choppers right outside the conference. If I get to go pictures will definitely follow.

So I got a new phone the other week. The new iPhone. For the most part it’s been pretty good. There are some issues but the fact that I can put a WordPress app, a Twitter app and the like on it is pretty damn cool. It makes it so easy to post that I now have absolutely no excuse for not posting.

My sister in PA went to get me a signed copy of Neil Gainan’s new book “The Graveyard Book”. It’s more of a young adult type book about a boy who lives in a graveyard and is raised by ghosts. The reviews are looking good so far and my sister “accidently” started reading it and now can’t stop. When I get my copy and get through it I’ll post my own review.

A very dear friend of mine is going through a tough time right now.  It’s brought back some powerful and sometimes painful memories of some bad patches I’ve gone through myself.  One not unlike the situation my friend is in right now.  The thing that has always brought me back from the brink of destruction long enough for me to take hold of myself and get through things has always been my friends.  I just don’t know that the value of close and loyal friends can ever be overestimated.  I have a lot of friends that I’ve know for years.  Decades, in some cases.  Those rare people that can get along with you for a prolonged period of time should be treasured.

So I wanted to thank my friends for being there for me all these years.  I hope that I can repay that in some way by being there whenever needed (be it Saturday afternoon or 3am tomorrow) for them, like they’ve been there for me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

My little nephew, Joseph, who is all of two years old, came into town last week with his mother to visit while his dad was at their new home getting things ready for them. You see, he’s just got a new job in Princeton, New Jersey. They’ve been living in Boise while he finished school, but now he’s done and landed a nice job. They’ll actually be living in Pennsylvania, just over the border from Princeton. So my sister and Joesph come to visit while the moving truck traveled across the country. It worked out since this weekend we celebrated my grandmothers 80th birthday. My sister and my grandma have always been close and had an extra special bond. It was good that she was here in town for that.

In the mean time, I was trying to teach Joseph some bad habits to take with him. (Did I mention that I’m the “crazy uncle”?) One thing he now does that I think is hilarious is called ‘puppy kisses’. This started with Jumpboots kids. They were teaching their first little girl to do Eskimo kisses and butterfly kisses. So I asked her if she knew how my beagle puppies give kisses, to which she said no. I then licked her face from jawline to hairline. She screamed and giggled, wiped it off and then ran over to give mommy a puppy kiss. This is now one of ‘my things’. One of those signature things that I teach my nieces and nephews. (Mostly because their moms disapprove) So I made sure that I spent some time encouraging Joseph to give puppy kisses to mom, grandma, basically everyone.

One of the funny things he does is he pronounces his name as Joe-fish , rather than Joseph. He’s a cute kid. I miss him.

As Jumpboot was asking, I thought I would give you all an update as to how well the 3 in 90 project was going.  Not so good.  I had some really grand ideas about writing more this semester.  My class load is a little lighter so I thought I could handle and additional project with no problem.  But there was/is a problem.  Several, actually.

1) I’m lazy.  When I don’t have to do anything, lately I just want to do nothing.  This wasn’t always so.  It just seems that the last few years have sucked my will away.  I blame the education system.

2) Narrow windows of opportunity.  Writing is a creative endeavour and creativity isn’t something you can really schedule for 10:50am to 11:00am Monday through Thursdays and 1:00 pm on Friday.  I have a real hard time getting three pages of anything that even I would read again later.  I suppose the objective of this project isn’t the content, but to create the habits, so this may be a lame excuse.

These both may just be lame excuses, so I’ll see what I can do about them, but I’m not doing so well on my novel.  I should have about 100 pages so far and I have 21.  Not so good.  Although that’s 20 more pages than I wrote last semester.  Yay!  So while I hate the setbacks and the sometimes feeling that this is all for naught, I do like that I’m not completely stagnating my creative writing.  The next few weeks are much more routine and mellow, so I’ll do my best to catch up on those other 80 odd pages.  Irregular reports to follow.

I’m taking college algebra this semester. Yay. One of the interesting things is that all our homework is submitted online. The website that we use to do that wanted to install a whole bunch of crap on my PC. It uses all kinds of Javascript and ActiveX controls. All the things that make my skin crawl. I’m a bit of a security paraoid so when I have to allow all this stuff I lose sleep. Not to mention that the site is damn picky about the format and syntax you use to submit your answers. Its frustrating to get the right answer but the system tells you that you’re wrong because you have an extra space after a comma. Lame.

In other news, I’m going to go ahead and try the 3 in 90 thing. I think three pages is nothing.  Even if it’s crap, I’ll still have something to work with, some starting point for later. I liken writing to using a pottery wheel. Most people think you can just create the final shape right away, but you really need to start with a big lump. Once you have most of your material out on the wheel, you can see what you need to add or remove and gradually you shape the story. Now some people are better at this than others, and some people don’t even write this way. But this is how it works for me, and most people I suspect. Isaac Asimov was said to type using a roll of paper, rather than sheets, so he could type non-stop. Afterwards he would junk entire chapters if needed. The important thing is to get whats in your head onto the paper.

Anyway, wish me luck.

My coworker has a nice new Volkswagen Jetta GLI.   It’s an awesome car but I’m starting to think that it’s cursed.  He’s gone through three windshields and had serious door dings pulled out and retouched twice.  He loves the car and tries to keep it nice, and yet it seems like every time he gets it detailed or something repainted, the next day there is a new tragedy.  Well, today he wrecked it on the snowy roads.  It may be totaled.  He may think this is s bad thing, but I think this is his chance to get away from that cursed cared.

Sorry about the huge sabbatical. Last semester was 17 credit hours and work was 30 hours a week. I have only 14 credit hours and about 24 work hours a week this semester. So it’s practically a vacation. I should stock up on suntan lotion and trashy paperbacks. Or graph paper and college ruled notebooks and migraine meds. They’re almost the same things, really.

So I’m thinking of participating in 3 in 90. The idea is to write 3 pages a day for 90 days and see what you can do. It seem more of an exercise in will power rather than improving your writing. Just to get you to put something, anything, into words. This is mostly to the good but for those of you who are just using that “I’m a writer” line to get chicks, the gauntlet has been thrown down.

I have some more beagle pics and updates, but those will come in a day or two. In the mean time, Peace be with you.