I originally got a LiveJournal simply as a convenience for commenting on my friend's LiveJournal posts. Then, during the period that I wasn't keeping an on-line journal of my own, I posted an occasional entry. Since updating my website to a modern content management system a couple years ago, though, I have had a blog where I could post the sort of ( Read more... )

I was invited to write a guest post for Self Reliance Exchange and was pleased to give them Find Your Self-Sufficient Sweet Spot.

There’s a reason we don’t see more self-sufficiency: It’s not frugal. It almost always takes more time to make something than it takes to earn enough money to buy one-and that’s without even considering the time it takes ( Read more... )

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The road is snow-covered such that it is impossible to see the lines of the crosswalk.  Does this make it more or less important to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk?

1. More important
2. Less important
3. Equally as important as when the road is clear
4. Shut up!  Can’t you see I’m on the phone!

Originally published at Philip Brewer. You can comment here or ( Read more... )

At brunch yesterday the topic of burial instructions came up, and I was surprised to discover that Jackie didn’t remember that I’d already documented my wishes for dealing with my remains.  The gist of my instructions is that (although I’d urge her to be guided by frugality) she should do whatever she wants.  However, I did add this proviso:

4. If ( Read more... )

My story “An Education of Scars” made the Best New Stories of 2009 at Free SF Reader, which gave it a rating of 4 out of 5.  Since they didn’t give any “5 out of 5″ ratings last year, that puts my story pretty close to the top of the list.

Originally published at Philip Brewer. You can comment here or there.

I published one short story in 2009:

• “An Education of Scars” at Futurismic

My story submission database isn’t really set up to answer the question of how many new stories I wrote this year, but I see three whose first submission to an editor was in 2009.  Hopefully some of those will appear in 2010.

Two articles of mine appeared as guest posts at ( Read more... )

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Since the demise of Hilary Moon Murphy’s Clarion Ex Machina site, there hasn’t been a good collection of links to all the various Clarion journals.  Now Liz Argall has fixed that with her page of Clarion blogs, journals, articles and interviews.

There’s lots of good stuff there.  I don’t know of a better source of raw material for people who are  ( Read more... )