“Alexa, do you love Mommy?”
For the last few months, our family has had an Amazon Echo in the house. It’s a (rather elegant looking) microphone and speaker gadget that we had set up in our living room. In it lives the voice of “Alexa.” She’s like Siri on your iPhone, except she’s always on. You don’t need to press a button, you just say, “Alexa, set a timer for ten minutes” and your timer is set. Her range is very strong so from almost any room on our main floor, we can ask her questions. Generally speaking, Alexa has fit into our routine very comfortably. The things Read more…
New Flash Fiction: Eleventh Hour Brother
Two months ago, I discovered that some fellow indie writers were creating a “flash fiction” anthology that would span genres. I was very interested. The main stipulation: all stories had to be under 1,000 words. One thousand words really isn’t a lot. (The Lead Cloak is more than 100 times as long) It’s hard to do much in that short space, but that’s what appealed to me. I made the decision to do something I’ve never done before–I wrote the story on my phone. My thinking was that writing on my phone would help me conserve words (there’s a reason emails coming Read more…
Our robotic future
With the rise of drones, we’re becoming a lot more conscious of how little robots are interacting with us in everyday life. Recently Mary and I watched an interesting and funny film about that very topic set in the near future called Robot and Frank. Frank is dealing with some kind of Alzheimer’s or dementia and his son, who lives five hours away, thinks a robot will be make his own life a little easier by taking care of Frank for him. It’s touching, and funny, and also has some jewel heist scenes, which you know always make a movie better. Read more…
TinyLetter
I’m trying something new. (That’s right–another new thing. Because why not?) TinyLetter bills itself as “email for people with something to say.” It’s not built for promotional emails with custom HTML designs and all that jazz. Simple, easy. I’ve subscribed to a few of these, and decided it was time to try it out. This is different than my regular author newsletter, which is exclusively used for alerts about new book titles and new formats. I didn’t want to water that down, which is why I’m trying out this new system. It’s an experiment. Sign up! First email comes out Sunday. (email image from Read more…
The Legacy of Technology
As I continue to work on Book II of The Lattice Trilogy, I am writing more and more about the legacy of old technology. Writing about “old” technology in 2081 means writing a lot about current times (and the next few decades). But there are so many examples of legacy technology today. We are surrounded by it. We often think of technology as this march of progress, but a better image would be of geologic strata. New technology is layered over older technology, but the old technology doesn’t go away. It’s just not as visible. It’s a much more accurate Read more…
Living with just one car …
We filmed a short video with a Masters student at UW about what it’s like to have just a Nissan Leaf as our only car. It’s been really great, as I wrote about earlier. But now we have a nice documentary video about it as well! Enjoy.
All Electric
Just over a month ago, Mary and I sold our two cars and went down to a single car: a Nissan Leaf–an all electric car with a 100 mile range. On the one hand, this might seem kind of crazy. 100 miles isn’t very far, after all, and if you turn on the A/C or the heat, the expected range isn’t even 100 miles. But after a month of driving, we’re really happy with the choice. A lot of people have asked questions about what it’s like, so I thought I’d devote a blog post to it.
Which of your friends on social media would take a bullet for you?
And who would just create a hashtag? 🙂 Nice illustration from Ted McCragg. Speaking of social media, I’m on App.net! Is anyone else?
Meet your next favorite book
Years ago I signed up for Goodreads.com. For some reason, I got out of the habit of posting there. I think that I thought I should go through my bookshelf and add every book I’d read. I also was temporarily lured away by Google Books, which had an incredible feature: you could search within books that you’d read. It turns out, though, that while that feature sounded awesome in theory, I rarely used it. And in the meantime, I stopped updating the books I’d read on Goodreads. When I started publishing my own books, I got back into Goodreads to Read more…
Reading “the Classics”
On my first day of freshman year of high school, my English teacher–Mr. Dudas–gave us a pop quiz. It was a take-home quiz, and it wasn’t a hard one. There was only one question: “What books did you read over the summer?” Being a bookworm, and eager to make a good first impression with my teacher, I went through my bookshelf and started listing them. I had read so many books that summer! Adult books even, like Michael Crichton novels. I had read so many books over the summer that I had to finish listing them on the back of Read more…
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