Day: September 26, 2013

Milestones

Milestones are tricky beasts. Sometimes they nudge your life in a different direction through stealth, and you are not even aware of them until months, or even years, later. Others announce their presence with a trumpet voluntary and fireworks.

In the last two years I have sprinted past a number of milestones – first blog, first blog post, first submission, first publication, first review, first podcast, and now first rejection. Yet of all those firsts, the one that has made the least impact on my life was the last.

Being rejected by Harper Voyager [the science fiction imprint of Harper Collins] should leave me feeling gutted. It doesn’t. And no, I’m not just saying that to cover up some deep seated, intensely private pain. There is no pain. As milestones go, this one did not even make it to a whimper much less a bang. Continue reading “Milestones”

Featured Book: Stone’s Ghost

Stone’s Ghost
by Melissa Bowersock
Available from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Matthew Stone doesn’t believe in ghosts … until he meets one. He owns a successful business in Lake Havasu, Arizona, home to the famed London Bridge that was brought over stone by stone and rebuilt over the Colorado River. He has a gorgeous girlfriend, a doting mother, and more money than he needs, but no time for stories about the ghosts who were transplanted from England with the famed bridge.

When a chance encounter with a female ghost leads to unexpected friendship, Matt and the ghost are forced to rely on each other as they confront the pasts that haunt them.

My Intellectual Prosthetic

Guest post
by Jeff Shear

I discovered the ghost in my computer back in 1987 when I realized my PC worked like an intellectual prosthetic. Of course every computer can be described as an intellectual prosthetic. By itself, the hard-drive functions as a prosthetic memory. The experience I’m thinking about was stranger and more mysterious. And it was all about writing.

About the time the first PC virus spread over the Internet in the early ‘80s, the buzz in the software world was “integration,” employing a common set of commands for word processors, spreadsheets, and databases. I jumped into the market purchasing a program called Framework. An integrated application, Framework was designed for business but was perfect for writing. Better than perfect. Framework took integrated software a step beyond, throttling the stubborn computer and turning it into more than the sum of its parts. That created unexpected synergies, and let the writing genie out of the bottle. Continue reading “My Intellectual Prosthetic”