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Wow...it sure was dusty in here. 

Life has settled down a bit, so I've had a chance to tidy up--cleaning out bad links, reorganizing the nav bar, adding fresh links, updating my personal info, and clearing out spam comments in old posts! I've thought about a redesign of the graphics and layout, but given my schedule in the near future, I think I've come as far as time, and my meager design skills, will allow.

I do have plans for a professional redesign of the site, but that is at least a year away (I'm thinking). Anyway, I'm glad to be back and somewhat settled in to our townhome in the Chicago suburbs.  I look forward to regular blog posts in the future.  

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Rejoice heavenly powers!  Sing choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King is risen! 
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered!  Glory fills you! 
Darkness vanishes forever!

Rejoice, O Mother Church!  Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God's people!

It is truly right
that with full hearts and minds and voices
we should praise the unseen God,
the all powerful Father,
and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Christ has ransomed us with his blood,
and paid for us the price of Adam's sin
to our eternal Father!

This is our Passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.

This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.

This is the night
when the pillar of fire
destroyed the darkness of sin!

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin
and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace
and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave. 

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer? 

Father, how wonderful your care for us! 
How boundless your merciful love! 
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son. 

O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer! 

Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead! 

Of this night scripture says:
"The night will be clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy." 

The power of this holy night
dispels all evil, washes guilt away,
restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride. 

Night truly blessed
when heaven is wedded to earth
and man is reconciled with God! 

Therefore, heavenly Father,
in the joy of this night
receive our evening sacrifice of praise,
your Church's solemn offering.

Accept this Easter candle,
a flame divided but undimmed,
a pillar of fire that glows to the honor of God.

Let it mingle with the lights of heaven
and continue bravely burning
to dispel the darkness of this night!

May the Morning Star which never sets
find this flame still burning:
Christ, that Morning Star,
who came back from the dead,
and shed his peaceful light on all mankind,
your Son who lives and reigns for ever and ever. 

Amen.

Swamped with packing.

Until I can get to a place where I can regularly update, here's a quick song that is playing endlessly in my head!

Umm...yeah.

This dude writes a new song every day. Check out more at his website.

The genius and winsomness of Creation often brings me joy.

Many moons ago, before I discovered the harsh reality of Organic Chemistry, I wanted to be a Cetacean Biologist. I have an abiding fascination with dolphins and whales. This little snippet caught my eye, and I've watched it multiple times--always smiling.

Dolphins are truly amazing creatures with a highly developed sense of play. The beauty of it is that this form of play is spreading throughout the dolphin community--they seem to be learning from each other.

Watch and enjoy.

Yup, I forgot last Friday.

Mea maxima culpa!

So, without further ado, here's a meaty quote that has resonated deeply with me:

There are those who say to the poor that they seem to look to be in such good health: "You are so lazy! You could work. You are young. You have strong arms."

You don't know that it is God's pleasure for this poor person to go to you and ask for a handout. You show yourself as speaking against the will of God.

There are some who say: "Oh, how badly he uses it!" May he do whatever he wants with it! The poor will be judged on the use they have made of their alms, and you will be judged on the very alms that you could have given but haven't.
                                                                                               St. John Vianney

From a new blog (Wormtalk and Slugspeak) I discovered:

This morning my son and daughter were playing "Mama warg, baby warg." Yes, they were pretending that they were bloodthirsty super-wolves, ravening through Middle-earth (though mostly it seems they were making "dens" by draping blankets over the furniture).

So I asked them, "What are your names? Bone-gnasher and Blood-fang?"

Son: "I'm Cookie."

Daughter: "My name is Patches."

Umm...that may just be the funniest thing I heard all week. I think I may have found the name for my Hunter's new Pet in World of WarCraft!

Hat Tip: Fr. Z

We're moving!

Again.

This will be the third time in as many years that I move between Seattle and Chicago. The fact of the matter is that Deb still has a townhome that we are paying mortgage on, and we just can't afford that expense along with a monthly rental expense. Something's gotta give (besides our bank accounts).

Deb has started selling jewelry for Lia Sophia, and she absolutely loves it (and she's doing quite well at it). I have a number of irons in the fire regarding employment and many of them are just about fully heated. Unless any of these irons are in a different state, however, it looks like Chicago (particularly Elk Grove Village) will be our permanent home after we are married (I can't believe the wedding is almost a month away).

So, Deb and I have put together a moving plan that will make this final move exceptionally organized (and cost efficient). I will very much miss my family and friends here in Seattle, but both Deb and I are looking forward to being closer to her family and starting our life together.

If I seem a little frazzled in the next few weeks, you'll know why! 

It's true.

I'm a fan of obscure, Cold War-obsessed 80's hair metal.

It's also true that tonight is the Series Finale of Battlestar Galactica!

Like another modern TV remake (Dr. Who), I came to BSG well after the 1st Season. I didn't trust the purveyor of much bad Trek (Ronald Moore) to create a series that was better than the campy late 70's schlockfest (which I firmly admit to loving as a kid chiefly because it was SF and, in those days, I gave my allegiance to any SF show no matter how bad it was).

After picking up the Miniseries DVD of BSG it was clear that I was wrong. And not just "wrong," but "oh my gosh, how-could-I-be-such-an-idiot" wrong. 

In its first season, BSG was everything that I loved in an SF drama--it had a powerful "alien" enemy that had reappeared after forty years, it had a regular, pulse-pounding military SF theme, complex three-dimensional characters, and powerful acting.

I was hooked.

Episode after episode this show delivered the goods! I became an ardent BSG fan, watching it through good times and bad (season 3 anyone?). And now, after so many mysterious questions and plot points have arisen, it's time for the Series Finale, for the Great Wrapup, for the mysteries of the show's convoluted plot to finally resolve!

Meh.

WARNING . . . SPOILERS IN 5 CENTONS . . .5 CENTONS UNTIL SPOILER IMPACT . . .

I used to have great faith in the show's creator and writing team. There were so many good episodes. But sometime late in Season 3, it became clear that they just didn't have a cohesive narrative going. Characters wandered about more randomly than the Human Fleet, wildly changing their outlook and behavior. Plot threads were dangled, and then twisted and left hanging. Different episodes seemed to swing in quality more than a Bi-polar schizophrenic off his meds.

This last season is no different. Sure, there were phenomenal episodes (and even episode arcs). The mutiny aboard the Galactica stands as some of the very best that this oftentimes phenomenal show has to offer. However, the writers have taken too many shortcuts to closing off a plot that seems to have been built randomly. Even the theme seems to have wandered--what began as an exploration of the human spirit and the meaning of human life has descended into a warren of cold meaninglessness--humans struggling fruitlessly against the fact that their lives mean absolutely nothing in a vast, distant, utterly empty universe.

If that's really the point of the show, then who gives a crap? Didn't that "revolutionary" position already get covered in the forties with Beckett's Waiting for Godot?. Art in service to despair is one of the greatest postitutions of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Barb Nicolosi, another late convert to the show, has something similar to say. Writing about the episode entitled "No Exit" (the return of Ellen Tigh), she opines:

So, there were two devices introduced to catch up the audience to all the plot points that should have been coming out in tantalizing ways over the last four years, but couldn't because basically, the show writers didn't have any idea where they were going until apparently the end of season 3. The first device was Sam's bullet-to-the-brain which conveniently released all his thousands of years of memories and which he then proceeded to dump on Kara and the other Final Four. The next device was a flashback to a newly resurrected Ellen Tigh, engaging in a weird mother to teenage son spat with Cavil, in which they argued evidently once again about why it is better to be nice (Ellen) and why it is icky to be human (Cavil).

From a character standpoint, the ensuing regurgitation of exposition was a mess. I guess it answers some of the questions they need to, but it was done in such a filibustery and "need to get this over" way, that it didn't feel fair. And so, even though we have been dying for and demanding answers, the result was unsatisfying.

The biggest problem is, of course, in the whole Ellen thing. What is it about being resurrected that turned Ellen the Ditzy Whore into Mother Teresa, eh? Ellen Tigh was a narcissistic, unbalanced, sexual predator, who routinely betrayed anyone who got n the way of her own desires and ambitions. Now, we are supposed to believe that she is the wise, technically brilliant, maternal, creator of the skin jobs and resurrection technology. Yeah, I'm buying that like I bought Denise Richards as a PhD in physics in one of the Bond movies...Just having had your memory stripped wouldn't turn you into a silly serial sensualist. She would have remained brilliant and loving, even if she couldn't remember having created a race of nearly perfect human clones. The truth is, Ellen was such a lightweight as a character, that the show's writers had killed her off. She wasn't coming back. Until they needed to dig themselves out of a whole.

It's all wrong.

Then, we are supposed to believe that Cavil actually knew who were the Final Five the whole time he was fighting Deanna over her quest to discover their identities. We are supposed to believe that he was having sex with his "mother" Ellen on New Caprica in some kind of Oedipal way, and plucking out Saul Tigh's eye in a fit of adolescent pique, all the time sadistically enjoying his power over not only the Final Five but the whole cylon race? It just isn't on the screen, folks.

No, none of it is there. For these revelations to be satisfying, the writers would have had to have planted seeds of them back there when we were watching those characters years ago. But they couldn't plant any seeds because they hadn't been able to think it all through.

Now, the writers want the audience to just go with them, and accept that there was this whole other AMAZING but hidden level of stuff going on. But there wasn't. 

And I think that's where I, finally, stand as well--I'm just not buying a large part of the plot. I know it's weird to say that you are having trouble with your suspension of disbelief when you watch a show that takes place in the future and you've already bought into the basic premise. But there it is.

I feel like in many ways the writers are thinking that I, as a consumer, am either too stupid to notice their blatant, hamhanded shoehorning or too much of a fan goober to care.

So, I will definitely watch this last episode--largely due to the fact that I care about these characters. That is, clearly, a testament to the writers. I only wish that they had delivered a narrative worthy of the complexity and value of their characters.

So say we all!

It's a jungle in here!

Well, more like a tundra. Here's a quick look at our siberian huskies' favorite pastime--howling.

Qila is on the left and Orion, the goofy boy, is on the right.

Michael Flatley, eat your heart out!

Slainte!

I'd like to wish all of this humble blog's readers a very blessed St. Patrick's Day. And, although we in the U.S. have managed to twist and pervert this saint's Feast Day into a day of drunkenness and debauchery, I hope and pray that each of us takes a moment to reflect on the importance of sharing our faith with the world--something that St. Patrick gave his whole life to. 

Here is part of St. Patrick's Breastplate Prayer, something I will strive to live out each day:

Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me abundance of reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

 For more information on St. Patrick and his Breastplate prayer (also called The Lorica), you can click over to this post from Amy Welborn.

The blood of Jesus calls out more eloquently than Abel's, for the blood of Abel asked for the death of Cain the fratricide, while the blood of the Lord has asked for, and obtained, life for his persecutors.

If the sacrament of the Lord's passion is to work its effect in us, we must imitate what we receive and proclaim to mankind what we revere. The cry of the Lord finds a hiding place in us if our lips fail to speak of this, though our hearts believe in it. So that his cry may not lie concealed in us it remains for us all, each in his own measure, to make known to those around us the mystery of our new life.

Saint Leo the Great, pope                                               

It's back!

Thanks to reader Jeff, I discovered that Realms of Fantasy will remain in publication. Tir Na Nog Press has purchased the magazine from Sovereign Media. Even better, the editorial team, including Editor-in-Chief Shawna McCarthy will remain in place.

Time to re-up my subscription. You can get yours by clicking here.

Venues for short stories have been slowly disappearing and/or morphing to electronic versions. I was mightily bummed to hear of the original shutdown for Realms of Fantasy magazine. As a reader, I'm excited that I'll still have the opportunity to catch fine stories in a printed medium.

As a writer, I'm delighted that I still have RoF in which to submit my stories.

I encourage anyone who may never have read an issue of RoF to pick up a back issue (or catch the April newsstand one) and check it out.

You won't be disappointed.

I hate outlines.

I always have. I can remember learning the process of outlining in Language Arts class and thinking how useless a skill it was. That has carried over into my fiction writing. I don't outline my stories. Even my two novels had the barest of narrative structure thought out ahead of time--just enough to placate my editors.

This, I think, is one of the greatest weaknesses in my writing.

I've been thinking a lot about ways in which to escape my addiction to rewriting particular scenes that have had an impact on me as a reader (see the post below). It has become fairly clear to me that the amorphous approach I use for plotting makes me vulnerable to this kind of problem. The creative process is different for everybody, but often for me plot threads come bubbling up from the subconscious. I let my imagination play with a story idea for awhile and once I feel like I have critical mass (enough threads to start writing), I proceed to type away and the story unfolds before me.

The problem is that my subconscious is haunted by my favorite scenes from other stories that I have read. This minimalist approach to plotting almost guarantees that some echo of another writer's scene will make it in to the story.

I've started to combat this tendency by taking a stronger approach to plotting. I am now trying to consciously weave these subconscious plot strands together to create a narrative structure that holds together better. Not only does this allow me to free myself from this writing conundrum, it also allows me to create three-dimensional stories that have greater intentionality in terms of symbolism and a greater contextual resonance--which is to say that I am more conscious of writing within a genre that has its own historical trends and conventions, and I can create stories that build upon or somehow relate to the "dialogue" that is occurring within that genre.

That sounds like a really stuck up way to say that outlining seems to be working for me. I'm not sure I'll ever be the type of writer who just needs to fill in the dialogue holes in their outlines to create a novel (and there are people like that), but I am embracing outlines as another tool utilized in the craft of writing.

Eventually, however, I'll actually have to . . . you know . . . write!

I'm a writer of middling craft.

That's not an overly harsh evaluation or an expression of frustration--it's the truth. As far as the craft of writing goes, I haven't even entered the Journeymen phase of my professional development. Sure, I've had two novels and multiple short stories published, but that doesn't mean I've mastered the craft of writing.

It means that I was lucky enough to get paid for part of my apprenticeship.

I learned a great deal about the myself and the writing process through the development of both Tomb of Horrors and Bladesinger. Through it all, I believe I managed to "write myself out" of bad habits and, through the insightful work of my editors, learn some good habits.

But I have a great deal of the craft of writing still to master.

Early on in my writing, I discovered that I was in thrall to the voice of my favorite authors. Everything I wrote (sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally) ended up sounding like a (mostly poor) imitation of the writing style of Tolkien, LeGuin, McKillip, Kay, Lee. It was somewhat dreadful.

I'm much more comfortable now with discovering my own writing "voice." Sure, authorial timbre can change somewhat depending upon the type of story you are telling, but by and large, writers must discover there own unique "voice." For the fantasy lovers among you, think of it as a wizard's glyph, his (or her) unique signature.

I'm still uncovering mine, and the process itself is a little unsettling, but I'm grateful it's happening. I still can't read the works of my favorite authors while writing my own stories, however. The gravitational pull of LeGuin, for example, remains quite strong.

With the recent elimination of my position at Maxon, I've had more time to write some of the stories that have been rattling around in my head--and I've discovered another area of the craft in which I have some serious issues that need resolution. The short of it is that I'm addicted to particularly powerful scenes and narratives from my favorite books. In every reader's life, there are those parts of a novel that capture their imagination, tugging at heartstrings and bringing a sense of wonder and fulfillment. Some of those scenes for me are:

• The Dark Rider attack on the Fellowship at the Prancing Pony in Bree
• The Battle at Helm's Deep
• Pretty much any scene with Ged studying magic at Roke
• Morgan's battle with the Founder at the ruins of the School of Wizardry
• Jaxom Impressing Ruth
• Pretty much any Hatching scene
• Morgan learning Vesta shape

 (Bonus points if you can name the books these came from)

 After banging my head against the wall on a series of short stories with which I've been struggling, trying to knit together an engaging plot, I discovered that I have been subtly trying to rewrite these scenes (and others) without even knowing it. Not only have the results been less than stellar, but this process has forced me down more than one dead end in terms of plotting.

Now that I have discovered this issue, I can work on overcoming it. I'll let you know how I'm doing.  

I've done it again.

While on a recent trip into Nevada, I picked up the third book in Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson series. Knowing how quickly I have devoured the other two books in the series, I forced myself to hold off until the end of my trip to start reading.

Seven hours later, I had finished the book.

Yup, it's that good. I wrote about my discovery of the series in a post I wrote several months ago. This time, Mercy Thompson, mechanic, Walker (she can transform into a coyote), and frenemy to supernatural creatures across the United States, must solve a murder in order to free her former mentor, who is himself one of the mysterious Fae.

Briggs once again utilizes her mastery of characterization and crisp, economical prose to launch the reader right into the middle of the story. Several times I found myself thinking about putting the book down and taking care of urgent things like, say, eating--only to reach a point in the text where I just had to continue on.

All that being said, I didn't like Iron Kissed as much as the two previous entries in the series. While I enjoyed learning more about the increasingly powerful and secretive Fae, it felt like this book rushed through its narrative too fast. In fact, the main plot concludes 20 pages before the end of the book, and Briggs uses the remaining space to wrap up several sub-plots. This made the conclusion of these smaller narrative arcs seem like they were tacked on hastily.

For example, Mercy decides to deal with a situation that ocurred to a minor character. What should have been a real experience of vindication for the reader, as they watch a minor antagonist get a bit of well-deserved comeuppance, ultimately ends in an unsatisfying half of a page.

Still, Patricia Briggs is one of the most engaging writers of fantasy being sold today. I would highly recommend anything that she has written, particularly the Mercy Thompson series! 

"Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse."

"So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other--my prayer for him--can play a small part in his purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God's time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain."

"In this way we further clarify an important element of the Christian concept of hope. Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too. As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking: how can I save myself? We should also ask: what can I do in order that others may be saved and that for them too the star of hope may rise? Then I will have done my utmost for my own personal salvation as well."

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope) Encyclical

New blogs sprout like weeds.

Some weeds, however, are more precious than flowers (at least in my metaphor).

One month ago today, Amy Welborn, Catholic author and incredibly insightful blogger, lost her husband, Michael Dubriel, a noted Catholic writer in his own right. Amy's blog, Charlotte was Both, had always been a thoughtful virtual space, where she applied the riches of the Church's teaching and her own experience to current events and issues in the world.

With the tragic loss of her husband, Amy's blog became an exploration of grief and the mystery of God's grace. With tender humility, Amy allowed her virtual community to journey with her through this difficult time. Anyone who wants to experience heartrending honesty, faith, and surrender should check out her most recent posts.

Before the death of her husband, Amy had mentioned the possibility of some changes in the future. As it turns out, Amy has started a new blog, Via Media, over on BeliefNet. Here's how she describes it:

This blog will hearken back to the Open Book days. I will be blogging frequently and on a wider variety of topics than I did at Charlotte. But even then - please don't take a lack of blog posts on any particular topic as a sign of disinterest or avoidance. I blog on topics about which I have some understanding and on which I have an interest in reading comments. I also refrain from blogging on topics about which every other blogger on the known Internet is feverishly posting, unless I have a spectacularly unique insight. Hah.

If you want to know the scope of what will happen here - take a look at the categories over there on the right. If you want to know a bit more about me, take a look at the bio. Beliefnet is my primary job right now, but when more of the personal business that descends at times like this is taken care of, will be returning to the novel I started last year and, I hope, finishing it. Publishing? Well, there's a challenge for you. We'll see.

I encourage everyone to check it out! 

Now that's change I can believe in!

H.P. Lovecraft casts a big shadow.

Apparently, it covers even popular Christmas tunes.

Since I'm gone this weekend teaching a Called & Gifted workshop at St. Francis parish in Incline Village, Nevada, I thought I'd leave you with this Lovecraftian-inspired video:

Ya! Ya! Cthulhu Fhtagn!