What are you doing this weekend? How about exploring a bunch of free ebooks to find some new authors? Fellow science fiction author Carolynn Gockel has arranged this bulk giveaway for two days only, so what are you waiting for? Dive into this smorgasbord of ebooks before it’s gone! There’s something for everyone ..read more

Sorry to disappoint, but there’s no such list in this article. Any list like that is a work of fiction in itself. As a culture, we’re obsessed with being #1 or having nice, neatly ordered lists of The Best Movies Ever, or the best books, etc, but these are a fallacy. You can have a #1 football team winning the Superbowl, but you cannot have a #1 book (even though Amazon and the New York Times try), and the reason is that it’s not a competition. Literature is not a game to be won or lost. It’s art. Usain Bolt holds the record as the fastest man in the 100M sprint in the Olympics. Who came secon ..read more

My thoughts on alien life are simple. Ask yourself this question: Is there life in outer space?  This is where people think there’s some debate, but there’s actually no debate at all. The answer is an unequivocal yes. We know with 100% certainty that there is life in outer space because there’s life on Earth, and Earth is in outer space. Now, it might sound as though I’m cheating you out of an answer, but this point is actually quite relevant. For thousands of years, our cultures and religions have been ego-centric, thinking of themselves as the center of everything. And so we s ..read more

Was it natural for me to become an author? Kind of, although it was a long, torturous road. In high school, I and a couple of friends were thrown out of our English class for talking and disrupting the session. Our teacher, Mrs Revell, told us to sit in the corridor and write out lines. We were told to fill two pages with the line, “I must not talk in class.” My friends started dutifully doing what they were told. I couldn’t. Mindless repetition was abhorrent to me. But I had to write two pages of something. So, I wrote the screenplay for a story called The Persecution of a Humble Student ..read more

This is an article I wrote back in 2019 that appeared on a technical website, showing how an IT log monitoring tool called Splunk could be used to find exoplanets. It’s a good example of how NASA, ESA, etc, make their data openly available for anyone to play with… and find their own planet!  ———————————— Splunk is a software platform designed to search, analyze and visualize machine-generated data, making sense of what, to most of us, looks like chaos. Ordinarily, the machine data used by Splunk is gathered from websites, applications, servers, network equipment, sensors, IoT (inter ..read more

What happens when First Contact comes down the end of a barrel? Here’s the synopsis for The Anatomy of Courage: Dr. Christopher Walters has been assigned to a medical evac team serving on the front line of the war against the alien invaders known as the Novo. As part of the Dog Food Squad, his role is to provide battlefield triage to wounded soldiers in no man’s land. Life expectancy at the Front is so low no one uses their real names, and he teams up with Hawk, Mouse, Leech, Lavender and William Sunday to save those he can from the brutal reality of war. The Novos, though, are not what they s ..read more

COVID is a bitch, and it’s not going away any time soon, so what can we do about it? For a start, make sure you’re vaccinated and keep your boost shots up to date. When it comes to COVID, it’s important to realize it is NOT a cold or a flu (which most people catch only once or twice a decade, not several times a year). COVID causes far more devastating cellular damage than the flu, and that damage accumulates from one infection to another, meaning it gets worse for your body, not better. The biggest problem when it comes to COVID is disinformation and misinformation. An example of disinformat ..read more

Recently, I came across a graph showing the heart rate of both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their moonwalk. Buzz was quite relaxed during the whole thing, while Armstrong’s heart rate was (understandably) elevated. It’s fascinating to compare this with their actual activities. Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility in 1969. If you can imagine the Eagle landing on the pitcher’s mound of a baseball field, you can get an idea about their movements. In essence, with this being the first of a number of planned missions, the goals for Apollo 11 were conservative. Their priorities ..read more

When it comes to storytelling, there are two broad categories of writing: plotting or pantsing. Plotting is a methodical, calculated, preplanned means of laying out a story arc while pantsing is flying by the seat of your pants. At first glance, it seems plotting is more effective, but plotters can dig holes for themselves, and the Disney+ show Ahsoka is a case study of why being a slave to the plot is a mistake. Don’t get me wrong. I love the show. I think the production values are astonishing. The casting and acting is brilliant (although the bad guys do seem to stand around a lot with nowh ..read more

For the record, I do not use AI for writing in any shape, way or form. I use Grammarly for grammatical assistance while writing, but I have not (and will not) use either its “rewrite AI” (called Grammarly Go) or Chat GPT because these systems are mindless. If someone uses AI when writing, I think they’ve misunderstood the point of writing itself. Writing is an art. The construction of a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a character, a plot arc, etc., are about making seasoned judgment calls and thinking about pacing and progression toward a goal. This is waaaaaay beyond the capability of anyth ..read more