My father died in 1991. He was 77 and had been diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer's about six months earlier, although the doctor suspected that, since Dad was an intelligent man, he had been masking the symptoms for a long time. The sad thing of the ailment is the peeling away of the subject's past and personality. I had been living in Los Angeles ( Read more... )

Sometimes you run across a writer who consistently entertains you, so much so that you are finally moved to write a letter of appreciation to that person. That's what happened to me in reading Chuck Dixon's work in comics. Chuck has an incredible knack for writing action, but I'd also been impressed by his ability to write women with all the ( Read more... )

I've been preparing to learn how to work with a 3D landscape modeling program lately. To start with, I needed to make a grayscaled topographical version of the map of my fantasy land (darkest color being sea level, lightest the highest elevation). I haven't yet tried to find out how this will be rendered in the program (I still need to learn my way ( Read more... )

Maybe I'm just getting crankier as I age, but I really hate seeng metaphorical phrases get mangled.

The one that drives me up the wall a lot these days is seeing "free reign". No, no, no! A thousand times, NO! I realize how it has come about, of course, and this one starts with the problem of homophones in English (you know, words that sound like ( Read more... )

Another of my online friends, Tim made a vivid impression from the first post of his that I read. He was justly ticked off by a particular event (that affected him personally), but wht impressed me was his sharp, satricial turns of phrase. He may make humble reference to the limits of his formal education, but he has a sharp mind and a love of ( Read more... )

(Trying to get back on track with many things ( Read more... )

Following some of the discussions here on LiveJournal about taking steps to back up posts by mirroring them on other blogs, I've started thinking about getting down to the brass tacks of designing the domain for my fantasy stories.

Now, mind you, I have always intended to have a domain for that purpose. But I haven't done any active planning for it ( Read more... )

I've been pushing on to the end of Art & Fear. And finally reached the finale of this small but very thought-provoking volume. And the end is a paragraph that follows on the thoughts I wrote about PREVIOUSLY.

The point for me about perfecting one's craft is to strengthen the durability of one's art. And the purpose of doing that is so you can do the ( Read more... )

A fistful of the regulars on Chuck Dixon's message board have become a close circle of friends for me. We came together because we all liked Chuck's work, of course. But over time, between the wide ranging conversations that Chuck enjoys encouraging and the frequent IM chats between some of us, a close "posse" develped. And we've been friends for ( Read more... )

It's something that has crossed my mind from time to time, but hadn't found a way to articulate: how do you describe the diffrence between Craft and Art? There are occasions where I have seen quality craft - in visual art or writing, perhaps - where I could say, "Yes, this person has mastered their craft, but something is missing. It isn't art."

( Read more... )