Crusade Challenge #1 - The Duck Defines Me

My entry for the first crusader challenge over at Rach Writes is finished. I had to introduce myself in 300 words or less within the following parameters. I had to tell one secret, one lie, one personal quirk, one annoying habit, one of my best character traits, and one of my most favorite things in the whole world. I also had to work in the inclusion of four words; bloviate, fuliguline, rabbit, and blade. It was a lot of fun to write. If you can find the lie, drop it in the comments section.

The Duck Defines Me

The first thing I became aware of was the sound of the waves as they fell upon the shore. Then the smell of salt on the breeze. I lifted my head, cracking open one gummy lidded eye, and winced as a blade of bright sunshine shut it tight. I opened the other eye and sat up.

One Family's Tragedy - A Plea For Help

I have previously written on this blog about the cliche that declares life can turn on a dime. I think a lot of cliches catch on because at their center rests a seed of truth. This seed tends to be a truth that is fairly universal, thus leading to the birth of the accepted cliche.

On Christmas Eve 2010 here in Delaware, life once again performed its cruel dime trick. The Haxton family, Paul and Trina, along with their two daughters Lyndsey and Hayley, were traveling to see family for the holidays. Sadly, they never arrived at their destination. They were involved in a horrible accident en route to their family celebration. Both Paul and Trina were thrown from the vehicle. Paul Haxton lost his life. His wife Trina was flown to a trauma center in Baltimore, her condition desperately critical. The two girls, ages six and four, escaped the accident with minor injuries. Nearly two months after the accident Trina remains at a rehabilitation center in Maryland. Her recovery has been long and arduous, yet she has been making great progress.

Writing - It's a Love/Hate Thing.

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."       - Vladimir Nabokov

"Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." - Gene Fowler

The act of writing is a strange beast. A creature to love and to loathe, quite often at the exact same time.

It can be an act whose very execution causes the soul to feel at one with the universe. The writer can almost feel the wind blowing full-on into the sails of the story, mother nature herself dotting the i's and crossing the t's. The act of writing becomes a journey to a mythical land, where mysteries abound and the unexpected can happen at any time. A tantalizing feeling of creative freedom unlike any other.

It can also be a real soul-sucking, spirit-crushing, pain in the ass.

Reality is Broken - My Review

My latest review is up on Book Dads. 

In Reality is Broken, world-renowned game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal, PhD asks the question "What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality? What if we started to live our real lives like gamers, lead our businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists?"

It is a VERY interesting read. Check out my review here.

A Bitter Cup of Joe or Beware the Evils of Facebook!

I woke up this morning at my usual ungodly hour to my daily helping of Morning Joe on the television. I keep it on most mornings as I prepare myself to face the day. As I wiped the sleep crud form my eyes and attempted to arrange my thoughts in some sort of cohesive order, Joe Scarborough was talking about an editorial he wrote about the dark, civilization crushing side of Facebook for Politico.

You can find the rant, I mean editorial, here.

The thread of contention that intertwines Mr. Scarborough's piece is that Facebook is "cynically feeding the narcissistic appetites of a self-consumed culture that is populated by teenage vulgarians, desperate housewives, and bored men."

Does he have a point? Maybe. Is it fantastically overstated? Definitely.

The Writers' Platform-Building Crusade or Should I Bring My Sword?

Community. A word that in some circles gets more overworked than Lyndsey Lohan's legal defense team and in others gets twisted and warped to mean things it was never intended to. Crusade. A word in the exact same boat.

I first started writing this blog a few years back simply because I enjoy writing. Always have. I thought it would just be a place to record my thoughts, write a story or two...just be an outlet to scratch the writing itch. I didn't tell many people what I was doing. I was a bit embarrassed at my own perceived pretentiousness of it, wondering if the world would demand of me what in the hell I thought was so important to say that I had the temerity to put it out on the Internet. And that, aside from some throat clearing, a few ahems and an um or two, I would have no reply.

I let my wife read of course, and a few close friends and family.

The Daily - As If You Really Needed Another Reason To Buy an iPad.

We picked up our first iPad a month ago and haven't been able to put it down since. Be it streaming Netflix, surfing the web, bombing annoyingly smug pigs into oblivion with several species of "Angry Birds", balancing the bank accounts, arranging laws of physics defying globules in "World of Goo" (and swearing profusely when our designs don't go as planned), selecting programming to record on our DVR, or any one of a hunderd other things, we have logged more hours on the iPad than on our Palm Pre Plus phones, and we have had those for almost two years. You do the math.

The iPad is one of those rare pieces of equipment that falls into the category of "as good as advertised"...and I believed that before they released The Daily app yesterday. Now, with the addition of The Daily, the iPad has passed from the hills of "as good as advertised" and into the mountains of "how will I ever live without one again?"

Against All Odds or My First Couples Only Skate

A few days ago The Wife and I took The Peanut roller skating. It was the first time I had entered a roller skating rink in more than twenty years. Being on skates again (I didn't even hurt myself!) brought back a lot of fun memories. One of them grew into this piece...

Her hair was curly, shoulder length, so red it seemed to glow with its own inner flame. Her eyes were green, the rich color of the Irish hills. I had noticed her before as she skated past with her friends, her blue and white checkered dress ruffling as she passed. As a child of ten, my radar for noticing members of the opposite sex was still brand new, awkward, hard to understand. Most girls flitted by without even a second glance, the barest hint of any sort of consideration. But this girl was hard not to notice.

The DJ at Spinning Wheels, the premier roller skating destination of my childhood, had just issued the call for a couples only skate. This call usually signaled a retreat to the arcade games for my friends and I. We were all about skating as fast as the attendants would let us, not skating while holding hands with girls. For some reason on this particular day I left the skate floor as usual, but instead of following my friends to wait in line to play the new Spy Hunter game, I lingered, watching the older kids and a few pairs of adults link hands and begin to skate. The first few bars of Phil Collins' song Against All Odds began to pour forth from the speakers.