Category Archive: Life

Samples of my fiction and poetry.

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March 06, 2009

Thinking of starting a separate blog

So I am planning to do more serious writing – the kind of stuff that may eventually get put into books I will want to get published. I am also interested in “beta testing” some of it on the web – putting it out there and getting some feedback on it. Now here’s the catch – I made a very deliberate decision when I started THIS blog to publish it under a “non commercial, for attribution” creative commons license. Essentially people are free to republish anything I say here as long as they don’t make money off it, they give me credit, and they preserve those rights in their copy.

But I am thinking that may not be appropriate for prose I hope to eventually publish.

So I am debating starting a parallel blog which is kept under a more traditional copyright. I would post my more serious writing there, and would also put up notices on this blog when I post anything “over there”. An imperfect solution; but it is the best compromise I can think of.

If I do this, it wouldn’t happen very soon – I would want to make sure that the new blog is visually distinct, and right now I have no interest in playing with MovableType templates. But I wanted to put the idea out there in case anyone has an alternative suggestion.

Any thoughts?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 18, 2009

Good question, Anne

I took last Friday off, which together with Monday being a holiday meant that I had a nice 4-day weekend. On Monday night Anne asked me a very good question for which I didn't have a great answer, and it has got me thinking (and blogging). Thanks Anne.

As background, several weeks ago Anne asked me another good question; but one which I have thought about a lot and therefore had a ready answer. She asked me "If you knew you only had 2 months to live, what would you do". My answer, without any hesitation, was "write". The reality is that while there certainly things I hope to do someday before I die; in most cases I would not have any regrets if I did not get to do them. I believe I have a life after this one, and that gives a very different sense of perspective and value on what I do here. Will I really care after 1000 years of being with God if I never visited Tokyo in this life? I suspect not.

The only real exception to that is that I have done a lot of thinking in my life about a lot of topics and have not communicated most of my thoughts to anyone else. While I may still be wrong in many of my opinions, to go on to what's next without communicating the fruits of my mental labors (whatever their value) to anyone here would seem like a waste to me. So, if I knew I was going to die soon, I would focus on getting down in black and white as many of my thoughts as I could – kind of my version of "The Last Lecture".

That wasn't however the good question Anne asked this week.

Monday night, Anne first repeated the same question above, and I gave the same reply: "write". Then she asked: if that was true, why did I not spend any of this long weekend writing?

D'oh

What I actually did this weekend was for the most part read and spend 12 hours playing a computer game (I am budgeting the time I spend playing games, and that was the limit I set for myself – I actually ran over by about an hour when I add up the sessions). I had actually intended to write some on Sunday; but I never actually got around to it.

Anne's question is an important one. If writing is what I would spend my last weeks doing, I really should be making more of an effort to spend time doing it now. Just as I am limiting the time I spend playing games, I should be setting aside time each week to write, and long weekends should have extra time allocated to a task that is so important to me.

Now part of the problem is that other than this blog, I'm not sure how to start attacking the other writing projects I have. There are, conceptually at least, several books I would like to write (some fiction, some non-fiction); but every time I have tried to start one I have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the task (a common problem with writers). The recommend solution is to just start writing and worry about the "big picture" later after you have some pieces done, understanding that the pieces may well need to be re-written.

Another part of the problem is that the unread books on my shelf continue to weigh on me psychologically, and I want to spend time reading to reduce their number (that was certainly what motivated me this weekend). Particularly with the Kindle2 showing up in a couple of weeks, I want to focus on clearing out the old "atom" books before I start in with the "bits" ones.

Regardless, Anne is right. If writing is important enough to me that I would spend my last days doing it, I really do need to make a greater effort to do it now. I haven't quite thought through how to organize myself for that; but it is a change I need to make.

Again, thanks Anne.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 25, 2008

Christmas Haiku

The Transcendent God
Incarnate as a Child
Joining God and Man

Omnipotent God
Come as a Servant to All
Leading to Freedom

Holy, Sinless God
Dies as a Man on a Cross
Bears our Sins Far Away

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 25, 2007

God so loved

God so loved

By Steven

God so loved, He created
Created the universe, with beauty and wonder

God so loved, He cried
Cried over man’s fall, and the evils it brought

God so loved, He promised
Promised salvation, for those who would trust

God so loved, He became
Became a child, weak and dependant

God so loved, He lived
Lived as a man, with all the pains and heartaches

God so loved, He died
Died to redeem us, freeing us from sin

God so loved, He rose
Rose to rule, with justice and mercy

God so loved, He dwells
Dwells within us, training us to be like Him

God so loved, He returns
Returns to end evil, restoring beauty and wonder

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 04, 2005

Four Joyous Fourths

I wanted to write about some of the specific memories I had of happy 4th of July's (from childhood on), and this unexpectedly came out. Not my best work; but I do poetry so rarely these days, I am satisfied.

Four Joyous Fourths

Bright sparkles on a velvet sky
Booms echoing against the hill
Eyes open wide, head tilted high
Drinking in the moment of joy

Rainbow blossoms cover the night
Thunder rumbles with every flash
Family gathered, all is right
Celebrating the nation's joy

Concert ends, then fireworks starts
Canon booms yield to rocket blasts
Crowds of people enjoy the arts
Stolen kiss from my love, my joy

On the bluff watching many shows
Too far to hear, but many seen
Just married. What comes next? Who knows?
Questions fade, forgotten in joy.

Posted by Steven at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 15, 2005

Exercise #1 (a start of a story)

I am an aspiring writer, still working on my craft by doing small projects, experimenting with new techniques, etc. I don’t feel I am ready to try to publish yet; but I am getting more and more comfortable with what I am able to produce. I expect to periodically publish pieces of projects for feedback. Here’s the first – let me know what you think.
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The commencement ceremonies at Prina University were flush with all of the splendor and spectacle the empire could muster – an endless series of speeches, awards, and choral arrangements. It was over two hours before they began to call the graduates forward to receive their degrees. Plenty of time for Prince Nico Bar-Ettran to perform calculations on the likely causes of the seats reserved for his house being empty.

Not that he expected his father, Duke Ettran, to appear. Nico revised his calculations of that probability the previous day and determined that it had actually dropped from 4 tenths of a percent to below 3 tenths of a percent. However the likelihood that the Duke would send someone to represent the house was 83.3478% likely. Nico had even asked Den – Prince Denor Bar-Aran – his closest associate at school check his analysis on that. Den has discovered a small error in how Nico had accounted for the recent productivity improvements on Thallen – a small industrial moon under the fief of Count Oren from which the house of Ettran purchased household goods; but the effect was insignificant.

Den of course made the most of Nico’s lapse – occasions where Den topped Nico in “serious” matters were rare, and with both of them graduating, unlikely to occur again in a friendly manner. True, their houses were allied; but business between houses were never friendly. Nor were Den and Nico really friends. The ability to form strong attachments to individuals was one of the things which was engineered out of the nobility when the empire was founded. The minds of the nobility were designed to always favor the needs of the many, and personal attachments interfered with that – among the many trade-offs made to create a true ruling class that disserved to rule.

So Nico spent must of the commencement reviewing the scenarios which accounted for the 16.6522% likelihood of no representative of House Ettran showing up to see him graduate…..

Posted by Steven at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)