Vampires and Robots

A while ago, I considered doing a food blog. This was back when I was young and idealistic and thought I would actually have time for such things. I've thought about it again recently, considering that my husband and I spend an awful lot of our time experimenting with new ways to make the food we love good for us. He's been amazing at coming up with recipes to replace the salt filled premade fake meats we used to eat a LOT of. I, on the other hand, have been concentrating most of my efforts on finding the elusive healthy chocolate cake/cookie/brownie/etc. Which leads to this post. I still don't have time to do a full blown food blog, but I feel I am entitled to divert from the vampires and robots every so often if I have good cause. And boy oh boy, I have good cause. This is a 36 calorie fudge brownie bite with a 24 calorie dollop of cashew cream on top. Since this worked out so well, I had to share. Especially because you aren't going to believe me that these...

I am not going to be robot food after all. For nearly two months, I've put my diet in the cold, robotic hands of the My Fitness Pal app. And I've lost twelve pounds. My husband has gone as far as downloading several workout regimen and fitness tracker apps. He's lost about double what I have. I've had similar success in the past without the aid of robot overlords. After all, in 2009-2010 I lost fifty pounds before I got my first Android phone. But I have to say, the app made it easier. When people get down on technology, I have to wonder what they are so cranky about. Sure, kids today are staring at a tiny screen in their hand more than ever, but that doesn't mean they aren't being social or that they are wasting their time. Anyone looking at me right now would think I'm having a rapid fire texting marathon. I'm not. I'm writing this post. On my phone. Actually, all of my blog posts are written this way. It's convenient and yes, Blogger ha...

I'm just going to throw this out there: you are getting stale. Enough with the remakes, reboots, thirty year too late sequels, and drunk bro movies. You have had one original idea this year and it was a corporate sponsored movie about toys. It seems that other than films adapted from bestselling books, nothing is new these days. I have stats to back this up. Let's talk about those book adaptions, shall we? Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, these made you quite a bit of money, didn't they? But people still had complaints. They left out that scene! That was totally different in the book! Who thought SHE was a good idea to play THAT role? This is ALL WRONG! You know what? There's a lot of really good books out there waiting to be turned into films. I'm not talking about the bestsellers. Milking an already established fanbase out of money that they're just going to regret spending is totally not cool. I'm talking about books by people like me, the...

There is a lot of advice out there for aspiring writers. Some of it is even free. Nearly all of it is conflicting, but one bit seems to hold: write what you know. It should be obvious to anyone who read my books that I followed this advice. It should be obvious to anyone who read my books that I didn't follow this advice. I'm pretentious like that. See, what I did was pull from my vast and varied personal experiences to set a realistic enough backdrop that you gloss over the made up pseudoscience that I pulled out of my butt. Write what you know is actually sound advice, but if we stuck to it all the time, where would the fantastic elements come from? Write what you know, but make up stuff if it sounds cool. But this isn't a post about the first rule of successful writing. This is about the second: Find your niche. The time for branching out is after you've made it. This too makes sense. Successful writers are genre writers. Stephen King wrote something like seven h...

Humans Persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. -Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear. -Gene Roddenberry Science fiction and fantasy are rather unique genres in that often times, the stories based in the wildest expanses of make believe are also the ones that best reflect the short comings of our own day to day reality. The quote above by Octavia Butler is, sadly, as true today as it was in 1988 when it was published. Also true is that the quote above from Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, is just as idealistic and out of reach as it was in 1971. In my own series, I take a far more pessimistic stance on the same theme: ...it seems that for every step forward this nation takes on ci...