Self-Portrait
Created using this nifty avatar creation site.
Heh.
Another Interview
I think this’ll be my last one, as I’m too busy with freelance and prep for the GAMA Trade Show to spend more time on these. These questions are from Jeb Boyt:
1. What do you like best about winter on the Great Plains?
The expanse, if that makes any kind of sense. When the large, flat areas that you see all around you are a uniform blanket of white, it re-inforces a feeling which I also feel, though with less strength, in the green of spring and summer. Being surrounded by that expanse is a very similar feeling to being out on the open ocean, which is something that I enjoy.
2. With your various creative pursuits – gaming, fiction, electronica – do
you find it difficult in choosing which one to focus on at a time?
Oh, Hell yes. I’m pretty much a textbook case of adult attention deficit disorder…I shuffle through interests like a chimpanzee with a TV remote. So much so that I pretty much have to be working on more than one thing at a time…so I guess the real answer to your question is “no”, because I *don’t* choose to focus on one at a time. I do it all.
3. What portion of your average work day is spent writing or composing?
On average? 10-11 hours. I get up and start working at around 10, and work straight through until 6 or so, and then usually put in another few hours after everyone else goes to bed (starting at around 11 or so, and usually crawling off to bed at about 2-ish). Most of that time is spent writing–or editing or whatever I’ve been hired to do. The compositional stuff is not really work-related for me, so I tend to do that during weekends, or on the occasional night when I feel that I’ve done enough during the day.
4. With many counties in the Plains states having less population than they did in the 1890s when the Frontier was closed, it has been suggested that these areas could be revitalized by purchasing land, taking down fences, and establishing a Buffalo Commons where bison are again able to freely migrate. Good idea or bad?
Sounds like a good idea to me.
5. Have you ever been to the Orkneys?
No, I haven’t. With my name, you’d think so, though….
A House Divided…is a pain in the ass.
Taken from this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO:
“New rule: Southerners have to at least consider voting for candidates from the North.
North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has a powerful argument in his bid to be the Democratic nominee when he says, “What I give people is a candidate who can win everywhere in America.” Translation: “We Southerners ain’t gonna vote for no Yankee! You suckers up North will take our Clintons and Carters, but we just ain’t buyin’ Kerrys and Deans.”
And that’s a shame. Not just for Democrats but for democracy itself. And I feel bad for the millions of intelligent people who live in a region still dominated by so much prejudice that anyone who wants to be president better have a twang in his voice and pronounce all four E’s in the word “shit.”
Sorry, but responding only to people who look and sound like you is small-minded, so if Southerners don’t want to have an inferiority complex, I say stop doing things that make reasonable people think you’re inferior.
Like, getting rid of slavery was a good start. But don’t quit there: Stop being the place that’s always challenging the theory of Evolution. What’s next, Gravity? Is that just a plot by the Jews up North to get people to drop spare change?
Southerners need to let go of the Civil War, beginning with those reenactments. First of all, you’re reenacting something you lost. It’s one thing to gloat about victory — when you do it about losing, your front porch is a few couches short of being decorated. The time has come to move on. The time has come to consider voting for a Yankee. Howard Dean’s Vermont is no longer where carpetbaggers come from. Carpet munchers — yes.
There’s no good reason that America, at this late date, still needs to be a house divided. At bottom, we all want the same things: dignity, security — and someone to slap the shit out of Janet Jackson.”
A-friggin’-men, Bill. Either get with the “E Pluribus Unum” program, people, or just secede again. This time we’ll let you and your 20-some-odd percent of the GDP go, because it’s just not worth putting up with you for it.