#uncoffeed...

If my math is correct, and I'm not sure it is, I'm looking at four years since moving into my Tiny Cottage. Four years post-divorce. The years I've been alone are many more than that.  Through January of this year I was caught up in creative mania; just when I wasn't sure I could keep up the pace, we got locked down. Every aspect of my day changed into a new pattern I had to learn. Neuro-diverse people don't usually do well with change, especially when it's sudden and drastic and mandatory. Change is exhausting. Then there was that election that had all our hackles up, and now COVID-19 numbers are on the rise again . Solitude is welcome right now. So much alone-time makes for so much introspection. More than ever, I'm cognizant of negative space, like that empty spot beside me where I'd thought a partner would reside. I understand that space - in fact, it's shaped like me. We take care of each other. I surprise me with flowers or rocks, sometimes ma...

Family is a funny thing. For me, it's funny like a congealed salad mold, or maybe those tiny canned hot-dogs usually meant for babies. It's a novelty with dubious beginnings and we're not so sure we want to hand down the recipe. AC Ewing was my father's father. I remember meeting him once at his home in Kansas. He had two matching dogs and a dining room that was open at both ends. I remember being asked firmly to Go Sit Down, and stop going in circles like a train (which is what I was doing in my mind.) I remember leaving with the impression that AC and his second wife didn't like kids much. But this story really begins with my father. He took us to Oklahoma every summer to visit his grandparents, but not AC. He took us to Texas with his second wife, but ultimately lost custody. Eventually he severed ties with all of us, but I got his phone number through a genealogy contact. My dad asked me if any of his kids had graduated high school, and he sent me $50 for the ph...

I recently had a conversation with ex-theatre board member John Timaeus about a lot of things. Adjunct to my role as blog editor at Igneus Press , I'd been researching publication fulfilment options and... Okay, I'm just gonna dive in and let you see how we ended up talking Linux , indie publishing, and cooking soup. JT:  This (pandemic) has been such a mind expanding time. It's been a PITA , but I think maybe we all needed the push to do something different. me: EXACTLY.  I've been frustrated with the big publishing bottleneck forever but not quite willing to go indie. New things are evolving and it's amazing to watch. JT:  Forget the bottleneck. Amazon self-publish works. me: It does, and yet it allows every level of quality through. Curation is still needed. I learned some stuff over the weekend. PAUSE: Turn the lights back on a minute. Let me tell you about The Author Encounter  and their #IndieAuthorDay, in which I learned about ISBN numbers; abou...

Part One of The Mechanic begins here .  Against the side of the cabin leaned a pile of wood, once carefully stacked but now riddled with holes and falling to sawdust. Here is where the Designer found an axe, like the one in the OZ manual. He hefted it; there was an interesting balance to this tool. The Designer swung its chiseled edge against a tree, and the axe stuck there.  He pried loose the tool and found another tree, one that looked about to topple, and plied that with the axe until the tree fell to the ground. Then he cut the felled tree into similarly-sized portions and stacked the wood against the cabin.  The repetition of axing and stacking soothed him; it was nice to have a routine again. It was nice to create a routine for himself, rather than being handed a set of instructions, with no team members to monitor for glitches. A Manager? No, a Woodsman. A surge of energy welled up in him, the way he'd felt when his team had won awards. He decided to walk back to...