I could be blogging about the crappy state of things in the US right now, but lots of people are doing that and I don’t think I can add anything helpful. What I can do is keep writing about what I want to write about. And this time it’s old movies. I finally got around… Read more: Watching Old Classics

Someone I follow on Bluesky recently posted an absurd demand from her HR department. It was a sharp reminder of the madness I experienced in my own career. One event that still stands out after twenty years was the demand that we begin reporting our monthly number of “capabilities delivered.” “Capability delivered” sounds like a… Read more: The Rule of 17

In the past few years, the excitement around electric airplanes has made it hard to separate the hype from the facts and even harder to separate the serious aviators from the fast-talkers out to get rich on government grants and venture capital. But rejoice! We finally have a real electric airplane to anchor the discussion… Read more: Reading about a new electric airplane

I was considering Thankfulness yesterday, and my thoughts spiraled into reflections on what I want to be doing with my life. My highest priority is providing a good home for my wife and her menagerie. Then there’s writing. And now I have the opportunity to build an airplane of my own, something to keep me… Read more: Not really disappearing, but…

My last post is no longer here. It was supposed to be mildly amusing. It was supposed to say something about how sitcom writing in the 1960s and 1970s affected my own “writer’s journey.” But it was forced, and the more I re-read it, the more tortured it felt. I was trying too hard to… Read more: Some days you listen to the voice…

[Update: I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking it takes four years to learn how to fly. It took me that long for other reasons. Normally it takes from 2 to 12 months, depending on your availability and the weather, with 60-80 hours in the air.] After four years of lessons, including a long… Read more: The view from 5,000 feet

In a week, I’ll be flying to San Diego Comic-Con. It’ll be the first time in three years. During the depths of the covid-19 crisis, I missed the Con, the people, and my friends. I missed the crowds and the long lines of eager faces waiting to get into the convention center each morning. I… Read more: More on Flying, Landing, San Diego, and Stuff

The title says it all.

Taking your first solo flight in an airplane is a huge step forward in learning how to fly. It means that the instructor believes you can do the following things all by yourself: make the correct radio calls, taxi to the correct runway without running into the grass, takeoff without turning left even though the… Read more: First Solo

On Christmas Eve, Meg and I watched the 1951 production of A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim as Scrooge. It’s her favorite film rendition of the story, and is rapidly becoming mine. But this year, it was different for us both. As Mrs. Cratchit and the girls sat in the shadows mourning Tiny Tim, the… Read more: The Empty Stool by the Fire

Well, I’m lucky. I got to have another birthday. Many people didn’t–more than usual. I got some fabulous birthday presents: My wife made me a fresh apple pie and gave me the five books of Conn Iggulden’s Genghis/Kublai Kahn series. An agent sent me a rejection letter that was very encouraging. She had even given… Read more: Happy Birthday to me

Flying is difficult. I thought it would be about five times harder than driving a car, but it’s far more difficult than that. People think of cars as moving in two dimensions and airplanes in three, but that’s not the case: Friction keeps cars from sliding sideways, so most driving is only one-dimensional (along a… Read more: How odd the blog that eschews the news…..

I can’t remember when I first heard Angus MacPhail’s word “MacGuffin”, the term for the object at the center of a story. In the early days of Hollywood, Pearl White called it the “weenie”. Cultures that strive for Capital-A Art might give it a fancy name, like l’objet d’le coup (I made that up), but… Read more: Holy MacGuffin, Batman!

So many annual rituals bind people together. We have weddings and births celebrated within families, and we have astronomical events like the Winter Solstice celebrated across multiple cultures. For people who enjoy watching others compete, we have the Super Bowl, Triple Crown, Indy 500, March Madness, Reno Air Races, and a host of others. For… Read more: Annual Rituals

Meg and I are the same age, give or take three months. Many years ago, when we were in seventh or eighth grade, we sat side-by-side on a car trip to see the Christmas lights in McAdenville, NC. Our parents had gathered both families together for the adventure–the long drive up from South Carolina, the… Read more: Colorful Lights…

Apparently, there is no November blog. But I did pass the FAA Private Pilot Airplane written exam.

In one of those strange moments, when I was drinking vodka and Diet Pepsi, eating a late supper because I had been in an evening class, and reminiscing about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I went googling for images from the episode Superstar (the one where Jonathan casts a spell to become king of the world… Read more: Jonathan Frid on Soap Operas…

Sometimes when I’m editing, supposedly minding my own business, I add some exposition to the book, then discover that the same exposition was already there a chapter or two later. Or I find myself explaining (to myself) “that part is not preachy and here’s why.” Now, people only say “that isn’t preachy” when it is… Read more: Blarg! I wrote that?

I spent four years in graduate school at large state universities. Toward the end of that time, someone posted this Matt Groening “Life In Hell” cartoon on the bulletin board. (For youngsters out there, bulletin boards were a primitive read/write social media structure, made from tree-bark, to which humans once attached sheets of paper using… Read more: “Stomach-Churning Agony”

Because of Good Omens and a friend’s fandom for The Hogfather, I’ve recently been reading some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Yesterday, I finished reading Moving Pictures. I won’t write a review or commentary, because (much as Sam Gamgee said when asked what he thought of Elves) Sir Terry is a bit above my likes… Read more: Beautiful Phrasing

While Meg is attending the IGMA Guild School this week, I’m taking care of the horse and the chickens. I tried to write a post about the experience, but I’m not really an animal person, so nothing I wrote about the animals was any good. I threw it out. Chickens made me think about my… Read more: Horse and Chickens

“Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.” — Dickens There’s so much atmosphere in those seven words. They reach out to the reader with an earthy simplicity and economy, and despite that economy, there is no sense of dry austerity. I suspect that an entire Master’s Thesis could be written about that single sentence, but… Read more: My favorite sentence in English literature

Having grown up reading and re-reading Tolkien (I even made it through The Silmarillion…once), I have never been able to shake the notion that “blog” is somehow related to “balrog”, or at least is something that balrogs say as they’re stalking frightened Elves through the starlit darkness. “Blog! Blahhhhhhg!” But there it is: the word… Read more: Lo! A blog!