American flag

Independence Day

Twenty years ago, I drove from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania to pick up my girlfriend, a recent college graduate. On the drive back, I proposed to her in Oklahoma (she said yes). We kept driving west. We arrived in Portland on July the 4th. I sort of registered the significance back then, but we hit the ground running since we didn’t […]

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The Quantum Thief

Review: The Quantum Thief

The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi, is many things:  a caper, a hard science fiction thriller, an action-adventure story, a cops and robbers tale, and a post-cyberpunk yarn.  The novel came out several years ago (with two sequels to date), but I recently read it and was compelled to review it.  The rest of my review is below the jump.

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the first draft

NaNoWriMo 2015: Conclusions

Well so much for my plans to blog every day during NaNoWriMo … or even to write an “end of NaNoWriMo 2015” post.  I wrote each day during November, and I “won” NaNoWriMo by reaching 50,000 words total on November 30.  Now that the white-hot streak of writing every day is long over, I find that many of the details

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NaNoWriMo 2015: Day One

I’ve attempted National Novel Writing Month (NanoWriMo) a couple of times in the past (once unofficially), but I’m going all out this year.  I normally dislike talking about word counts and “the writing process.”  It’s just not me.  But I figure if I’m going to blog about NaNo, I might as well go all the way! The last few days

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the first draft

Drafts

We’re all drafts.  Our lives are spent making notes on the backs of hands, in files, or on scraps of paper, musing on half-finished ideas, starting and abandoning projects, and constantly revising what we do finish.  I like to be busy, I like to listen, and I love telling stories. These desires, for a long time, have been mutually exclusive. 

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Cramped Futures

I like inventing futures.  It’s fun to think of what humans will be like a thousand years from now.  There are the “macro” factors, like economics, sexuality, art, politics, and starships (of course).  But part of the fun is also thinking of the minutiae. Will we still drink coffee in the year 3000? Will schools and learning be drastically different?

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Facebook Purgatory

It seems like a social media rite of passage to write about quitting Facebook.  Many hate its privacy (or anti-privacy) policies. Then there’s the company’s brazen admittance that it messed with its users emotions.  I get it.  I’m not a fan (friend?), either.  I’ve deactivated my account before, and I haven’t had the mobile app in years.  But I still

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