Science Fiction: A Study of Humanity

My writing group consists of four generations. I am the oldest—the only Boomer (the Baby Boomer generation ended in 1964). We have Gen Xers (born 1965-1980) and a few Millennials (born 1981-1996). Our one Gen Z member comes when she’s not at volleyball, dance team, or other teenage social engagements. We have females and males in our group…

Artificial Intelligence. The name should say it all, but the concept is what concerns many people. When one thinks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) you may think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. Skynet sends a cyborg assassin through time to kill all humans. Another science fiction movie that depicts artificial intelligence…

I've been steeped in the 1970s. We watch an episode of The Love Boat each night and are about halfway through season two. This iconic show is great because you can see many past actors. The guest stars are people you haven't seen in so long; all the well-known faces that make you nostalgic for the '70s. The Love Boat got high ratings in its time, and most people watched it every Friday at 9:00 pm. As I watch now, I see that it's outdated and stands the test of time. I should write a blog post on just The Love Boat because there are so many aspects of the show, the people, and the cultural norms that surprise me. But now I'd like to talk about the shows that didn't do well

As a freelancer, I’m vulnerable to scams and cons. I had an idea that it would be an issue, only when I had to put so much information about myself on my website. But what I didn’t expect were the lengths scammers will go for a small amount of money from an insignificant person like me. And it had nothing to do with my website.

Here are the details:

1. There is a website I go through called Upwork to get jobs. I haven’t gotten any jobs from their website yet, but it’s set up for freelancers like me. The freelancer will put information on the website as you do on LinkedIn. Such as your business name, your credentials, your picture, etc.

2. When a freelancer (me and many people like me) finds a job that they would like to do, they bid on it with what Upwork calls “Connects.” Some jobs require more Connects than others, and if there’s a job that the freelancer really really wants, they can try to outbid anyone else by adding extra Connects. To give you an idea, I have 50 Connects and I bid 12 Connects so I can get the job I’m going to talk about. (This means, I outbid everyone else and basically begged these scammers to scam me.)

3. Then I got an email saying that they…

Merry Christmas!

Thank you all for reading my blog posts and showing your support while I start my business. It’s been a wonderful experience as I learn how to run a blog and a business. Cheers to all of you, and I wish you all a wonderful Christmas season.

God bless!

With the end of another November, there’s another end to NaNoWriMo. And endings are the theme of this post. Many people try to write their novel from beginning to end in one month, the month of November, during National Novel Writing Month. A website I follow (Writers Write) says that the average novel involves about 80,000 words. With many people able to “type about 1000 [words] in one hour,” November saw NaNoWriMo participants put in at least 80 hours of focused writing. But if you’re anything like me, you spend at least an hour rewriting, editing, and surfing the net each time you pick the story up again. So, writing your first draft in one month is …..

Christmas is a magical time of year. A time that engages all five senses in their entirety.

Your five senses:

Sight Hearing Touch Taste Smell

When you read each of those words, and think of this season, what ideas come to your mind?

I’m going to name just a few, and I think that you can name so much more.

Sight: the perfectly decorated tree, snow falling from the sky, Christmas lights twinkling on houses.

Hearing: Michael Bublé singing Let it Snow, Nat King Cole singing Joy to the World, all the songs…………

I’m working on one of my final edits of a book I’m writing for teens. It’s about a young lady who has moved to a big city from a small town and is having difficulty meeting people. In her hometown, she has lots of friends. In her new school, she eats lunch in the library by herself in a corner cubby because she’s too scared to venture out. This, actually, is taken from real life. When we first moved to Portland, Oregon—from little Albany, Oregon—I had to change schools during my junior year. I want to repeat: DURING my junior year. If we had moved in the summertime, maybe I could fake it, slide in and act like I had been there all along. But when……..

As I sit here watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thanksgiving morning, I think of my bucket list. Yes, I am insane enough to want to someday go to that parade. Today looks like a beautiful day in New York City. The participants are wearing coats, hats, and gloves, staying warm. Even though they’re outside, many of them wear masks to keep the Covid numbers down. People are laughing and enjoying themselves. Why wouldn’t I want to be a part of that fun energy? That’s what I like: fun.

So it ticks all the boxes: fun energy, festive environment, in the most energetic city in the USA.

After going public in 1922, R. H. Macy & Co. began …..

Writing a book is such a huge accomplishment, and as an editor, I get to be in the midst of that artistic process. One of my clients has just finished his book, and it is ready to be purchased on Amazon both in paper copy and on Kindle. The look of happiness and pride on his face when it was finally downloaded to his KDP account was priceless. His happiness was also mine because I know how many thousands of hours he took to create the book. He spent so much time researching and imagining and writing, writing, and more writing. And then, when he got the book to the final stage, he hired me, and I made him do even more editing. Story building. Scene creating. Character enhancing. He told me that he felt I was giving him a creative writing education equal to that of a master’s degree. I like that because…

Changing My Mind Changed My Life

Wednesday, April 10, 1957.

Harford County, Maryland.

A run-of-the-mill, unexciting work day…until lunchtime.

“Dorothy, have you ever gone to a USO club?”

“Isn’t that where soldiers go for coffee and donuts,” I asked my girlfriend.

“Well, sometimes on weekends. But I’ve heard they have a dance at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds every Wednesday. Would you like to go tonight”

Please read the rest of Dorothy’s story by clicking on the link to the blog.

On Saturday, October 29, 2022, I met some friends at a pub in downtown Vancouver, WA called Brickhouse. If you’re like me, in reading that name, you hummed or sang the song Brick House by the Commodores (1977). But this Brickhouse isn’t a woman who is “mighty mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out” but a restaurant at 109 W 15th St in Vancouver that is, quite literally, made from brick. As my friends and I enjoyed our sense of community as we sat and caught up, people arrived dressed up in Halloween costumes. People walked along the street in…

Ah, the internet. What would we do without it these days? Well, I found out. The internet in my office was running so low the last two weeks that it barely even existed at all. In fact, it didn’t. The little button on the computer that shows all the available wi-fi connections couldn’t even pick up the “Regus” internet. (Regus is the name of the company that runs these offices.) I went from believing it was an issue with my computer to getting so frustrated with it that I just stayed home a full day. Why come in if I can’t use the internet? Why am I paying rent if I can’t use the internet? How can I run this business if I don’t have internet! Then I calmed down…

When asked what I was doing this weekend, my answer was, “I’m going on the Fruit Loop.” Which made people think I was losing my mind and becoming a fruit loop myself. But they were kind enough to ask, “What is that?”

Which led me to say, “I have no idea; I just know that we will see fruit. And we start in Hood River, Oregon.” But now that I know, because I have first-hand knowledge of the magic of the Fruit Loop, I am happy to say…

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Steven King said this about writing (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft), but I think it can be used in a universal way to include anything that you begin. It’s the beginning that’s either the scariest or just plain difficult. Whether it’s leaving your house to exercise, deciding to make that trip happen, quitting your job and going out on your own, looking for a publisher for your book, sending a query letter to an agent, or just leaving your house to go for a walk, the beginning can be the scariest moment. Why? Can’t we just use the Nike slogan, “Just do it!” here? Why is the scariest…

I was working on my undergraduate degree, sitting in a classroom full of English majors, and focusing on the teacher standing at the front of the classroom. She was our professor’s assistant and had taken over teaching that day. She wanted to talk about poetry, we wanted to talk about the grades we had gotten on our most recent assignments, and we ended up talking about semicolons. Kind of.

“When do you use a…

Starting a new business is a process. And part of that process is to update your LinkedIn profile. The last time I visited my LinkedIn page was when I was working on my master’s degree, five or so years ago. So, of course…