December was a month of reflection, celebration, and diving into an old project to learn new skills.

My situation at work has altered slightly and I need to add to my skillset in order to properly handle the work I see coming my way. So I dusted off the ten year old code for Pocket Empire and began a massive rewrite. I use the same images and the old math used to compile and place the image overlays for the maps and worlds, but everything else has been redone. Instead of an old .NET application both front and back, it is now an angular application with a .NET Core web service. ... [More]

In just two weeks I will no longer be able to loudly proclaim that I am still in my fifties. Something I had been doing more and more frequently these last few years. That is, without making myself a liar. On the 15th of December I shall pass beyond the veil of that sixty year mark. My oh my. How time has flown. Seems like only recently I was joking with a friend that we needed to party as hard as we could because when we reached twenty, life would be over. We would have to get jobs and act like grown-ups.

Sometimes I want to go back just so I can slap that guy up the side of t... [More]

I've finished my most recent round of rewrites on the first Red Ice book, Murder on a Monochrome World and submitted it to a publisher. Well, the first three chapters, anyway. That should take a few months for a response.

I am now making another pass on the first Rise of the Automated Empire book, Final Assembly. I recently had an editor tell me I needed more conflict earlier in the story, so I performed a little surgery on one of the character introductions and will expand it a little as I go. I've been addressing issues people have had as I go, so ... [More]

So much is happening in the world right now. I have so many thoughts and feelings. So many things to write about. The war in Ukraine comes to mind first. As I write this, Ukraine is taking back land in what the media refers to as the south and the east. After pushing Russia out of most of Kharkiv (har-keev), they drove them out of a key city in Donetsk and then pushed into Luhansk. All the excitement made people wonder if their strategy in Kherson (herse-on) was just to pin down 25,000 of Russia's finest. We now have the answer. Pin down, and let starve, then push them off the land. ... [More]

May and I recently traveled to Minnesota for a family gathering. We were there to memorialize a recently passed cousin of mine. While we were there it slowly dawned on me, I was one of the oldest people in the room. It had also been about a decade since the last time we were up there. So a lot of the faces I was seeing looked too old. Kids had grown, young adults were now middle aged with children of their own. There were several that I hadn't seen since far earlier. One young woman I hadn't seen since she was a toddler. A few I hadn't seen since I was a toddler.

We mostly avoi... [More]