… on our Second Amendment. No doubt you all know about the tragic attack on the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. None of you will hear me say that this was not a horrific, gut-wrenching attempt. I will, however, say that trying to take away or reduce our right to bear arms is not the right thing to do. School shootings have become, unfortunately, more and more commonplace; with the first being the shooting carried out by Eric Houston at Lindhurst High School, located right here in my area. Since then, many others have taken place. However, this is the first time I can recall hearing the noise being made by mostly Democrats, screaming for gun control. My...
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Dear Readers, as I am sure most, if not all of you know, quite a few of my fellow Californians attempted to abolish the death penalty here in this state. Instead of putting monsters like the one I will tell you about in this column to death, they wanted to give them life sentences without the possibility of parole… basically wanting us to continue housing them and giving them free medical care, etc. for the rest of their lives; and in the process DENYING the victim’s loved ones the closure that is so desperately needed in cases such as this. While I will freely admit that the execution of the murderer will not bring about complete closure, it can...
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Of all the writer’s minds I’d like to crawl inside of and investigate for a while, the mind of Christopher Moore would definitely be in my top ten. Probably my top three, actually. With his vivid imagination, exceptional storylines, exquisite characters, and wicked sense of humor, I doubt there’d ever be a moment that wasn’t good times. I was so excited when Christopher told me he’d give me an interview that as soon as I sat down to form some questions, my mind went blank. There were so many things I wanted to ask him, and as nice of a person as he is, I didn’t he’d like being bombarded with a 150 question interview. My mentor, Kim Williams-Justesen...
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Readers and Characters by Wm. Luke Everest         “The reader follows the character, not the story,” said Scott Bradfield. This was scrawled in red ink at the top of my title page. I had a billion questions and I was nervous of bombarding the man as he probably had a novel to write. The problem was, the statement doesn’t make any sense until you already understand it–the key problem with all good writing advice. Fortunately, elaboration on such statements is what this blog is all about. Let’s break the statement down into its component elements. We all know what “the reader” is, so let’s move onto “follows”–a question of what the reader does. We take an...
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Imagine this scenario: you get either a knock on the door or a phone call from a police officer, informing you that a family member has died at the hands of a drunk driver. That they, as cold as it may sound, has joined the ranks of the seemingly ever-increasing number of victims who have lost their lives every fifteen minutes. Or, picture how you might feel if you are the person that caused the death of someone’s sister, daughter, mother, brother or father because you were dumb or selfish enough to get behind the wheel of a vehicle; knowing that you were drunk but still not caring about the possible repercussions of your stupidity. Earlier this year, I...
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It’s been said that writing is a solitary vocation, and while that’s true in terms of sitting at the desk doing the actual writing, it is far from the truth in terms of community. As I’ve made my way down this merry path of writing, I have repeatedly been surprised by the kindness of the writers I’ve met. Today, I sat with my friend Sherrie in our favorite restaurant, talking about writing. Sherrie is a very talented writer, and as we conversed, it occurred to me that three years ago, I never would have believed I’d be where I am today. Three years ago, I was struggling with my first novel, plugging along with no real idea what I...
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When I first met Lori L. Clark, I was immediately struck by her quick wit and awesome sense of humor. Lori is fun, optimistic, and genuinely kind. Having had the pleasure of reading her novel, Tyler Falls, (which you can find on Amazon) I can also say she’s a skilled writer with a knack for damned good storytelling. When I began doing author interviews on this blog, I did it with a mission in mind: to heighten the awareness of the works written by the author’s I admire. Lori Clark was one of the first people I wanted to ask. As someone who has been on both sides of the publishing spectrum (self-publishing and traditional publishing), I thought she’d...
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WATCHING THE SUNSET IS WONDERFUL By Walter William Safar   A few years ago, Deutsche Welle wrote about an Ethiopian restaurant inBerlin, where an Ethiopian woman worked nearly 24/7, thus earning all of 500€ in over a year and a half.   The African cocoa industry is experiencing a boom on the backs of children, in Chinathey work in mines and on construction sites, inVietnamthey manufacture sneakers and shirts, and on the Philippines they work with dangerous chemical fertilizers… The world’s greatest banks became so powerful that they are able to create the systems in most of the world’s...
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Long lines or short? Poetry’s origins are in song and chant that made their impact by sound. It remains, for me, an art of the spoken word: that it’s seen in print on the book page or the computer screen or by Kindle is a convenience but not an end. We need to hear it, in our heads at least. I think that helps to explain why I rarely use very short lines. If anything, my lines are getting longer. Very short lines produce a shape on the page that may be pleasing and is most obviously different from...
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Sit in the plush arms of a sofa in Dachau A candle breathes wisps of blue-grey into the morning in Dachau Tardy German versions of yank-pop on the perpetual stereo in Dachau You’ve had a lovely breakfast in Dachau Do they call them ‘cupola,’ spires that rise from an older culture to a new-day view of the hills, above the tram-lines and writhing miles of good folk busy with life in Dachau A hotel tells for six corners of the earth the time, from off its cream-lacuered, fine-angled and immaculate walls in Dachau Write a little poem, why not,...
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Richard Dawkins proposes a “spectrum of probabilities” for answering the question, “How much — or how little — do you believe in God?”: 1.0 Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. 2.0 De facto theist. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. 3.0 Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. 4.0 Completely impartial. Exactly 50 per cent. 5.0 Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. 6.0 De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. 7.0 Strong atheist. So like the Fahrenheit scale and Celsius...
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by Alabaster Deplume Liz Green is a marvel of a curmudgeon. As I look on through the studio window, down upon the audience, the stage, the radio gubbins, I see she’s sat ready to spit at anything that doesn’t move, in a garden of well-wishing colleagues and contemporaries, to whom, I know, she feels she owes some explanation for her place in this, the dream she’s living, but of which she’s never cared to dream. She has her microphone pointed to the ground, and her gaze following on after it, as the translator speaks smoothly into her ear. I’d...
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“I’ve seen it recently said on LinkedIn that it’s wrong to limit poetry through any kind of definition, wrong to say that anything isn’t poetry.”   I understand the thinking behind this – and maybe at times I’ve been too willing to make absolute statements about poetry. But if anything can be poetry, why can’t anything be a telescope or a burp or an ideology? In which case, what’s the use of words? Can a boiled egg be poetry? Yes, we might say a boiled egg was poetry if we particularly liked boiled egs, or were exceptionally hungry, or...
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According to some academics, it’s meaningless to ask what a writer meant, or at least, pointless because we can’t tell. Maybe nothing means anything. This is an attitude that could only exist in academia. People everywhere else are engaged in the risky, uncertain business of guessing what other people mean all the time. A general or a business competitor analyses his or her opponent’s motives, what the opponent is trying to achieve, and, faced by an unexpected move, tries to work out what he or she means by it. A chess-player does the same and even a footballer does,...
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