Going Inkless

     Writing tends to be a solitary activity.  We may be able to perform it in crowded places if we're lucky enough to have the focus while riding the train or sitting in some common space.  When you come down to it, though, the actual act of stitching the words together into meaningful patterns is all done alone in your head.  With that basic fact established, I will also say that writing is more social than most other things you do alone.  For one thing, writers of fiction tend to walk around with all sorts of people in their heads.  Even when we are alone, our minds are often working in social ways.  But the aspect I wanted to examine in this post was the camaraderie among those who practice this solitary art.      While it could be said that authors are in competition with each other, you rarely see them behave as if they were.  There is a realistic limit on how many books may be published in the world, and...

     I dreamt I was in bed one morning, lying awake, trying to get the last few minutes of rest before the alarm would ring.  Lists of what I would do for the day came rushing up.  They compiled themselves in steady ticks like an old printer spitting out one line, then another.  Still, I determined to stay prone, squeezing out every moment to which I was entitled.  I planned to hit the snooze alarm when the clock would blare.  I calculated the number of minutes that would buy me, the number it would leave me on the other side of the morning- how long I would have to get ready for work, and what I could do to compress the necessary tasks into the new timeframe.  I knew I wouldn't sleep anymore, but I was stubborn and wouldn't compromise the sleep time even if I wasn't using it for the intended purpose.  But I was.  Sleeping.  Sleeping and dreaming of not sleeping and wishing I was sleeping.      Sleep deprivatio...

     Libraries are often thought of as quiet places.  They are quiet places where gentle people work quietly for the good of the community.  It's almost a sacred image.  For this reason, when someone finds and challenges a perceived threat to public decency among the stacks, they often expect the librarian to be as shocked as they are.  They assume the librarian will be mortified that such pestilence would have crept into their carefully tended garden while they weren't looking.  A concerned complainer rarely expects the library to defend what they had hoped to eradicate.  Yet, libraries generally stand squarely opposed to censorship of any kind.      One might think that this is some misplaced affection for all books.  While it's true most library professionals and paraprofessionals do love books, I have seen ruthless weeding operations when room had to be cleared for new acquisitions.  It's no place to be squeamis...

     Everything washes away.  Entropy is worked into the fabric of the universe.  That's not just a philosophical concept, either, but a scientific fact.  Physicists tell us that there will not only be a day when everything we know of the world is gone, but the universe itself will dissolve into aimless, drifting particles.  The good news is that before that day, we may have entropy pulling things apart, but we also have a tendency for things to come together.  There are forces at work that take up disassembled bits and reconstruct new things from them, recycling the world over and over.  Today's mountaintop may one day be part of the ocean floor, or the other way around.  Last year's flowers may feed this year's sprouts- if they weren't converted to butter by some helpful cow.      It goes without saying that humans play a role in this continual reshuffling of the deck.  We all have an urge to build.  Putting ...

     Vacation, a time of rest- meaning a time to do the rest  of the things you never get around to in a normal work week.  A certain amount of the vacation I'm allotted must be used before the end of the year, or it melts away.  Since I'm often busy with the next big project, anticipating a meeting, or adapting to changes, the scheduling of those days gets pushed toward the end of the year when the pressure is on to use it or lose it.  Generally, my first significant vacation of the year ends up being in late August.  It works out because that's generally when there's more going on in my personal life that I'd like the time to enjoy- the GenCon gaming convention, our ( my husband and I ) wedding anniversary, my husband's family reunion (followed in September by my family's annual camping trip.)  I started a week off on Wednesday, spending the day on the deck in the sun, but not as you may think.  Vacation, as I've said, is usually a tim...

     I knew when I planted them that these would probably be the last tomatoes I would be able to grow in the back yard garden.  Our trees have been getting steadily bigger, their flourishing foliage increasing the shade there year after year.  From one crop to the next, I've moved their position in the plot to maximize their time in the sun.  Vegetables in general tend not to be shade plants, but some require more sunshine than others to do well.  Tomatoes and peppers, two of the most requested vegetables each time I ask my family what I should plant, are particularly sun-hungry.  So, when spring buds unfurled into summer leaves, and the canopy began to block out the sun, I wondered if we would get any fruit at all from these plants.  They started out looking weak and spindly, so I've worried over them all along.  While I'm generous with the compost, I don't use chemical fertilizers in our garden to give things an artificial boost. ...

     NOBODY likes to pay taxes.  Even the least materialistic left-leaning person would rather hang on to  the money they've earned and spend it as they choose.  If you recognize the need to make money in order to take care of the practical stuff in life, you tend to want to keep those gains without having to hand over any more than you have to.  The instinct to take care of number one is a pretty basic one.  So, why do we have taxes that everybody would rather not pay?  Is it because the evil government just wants to waste more of your money on programs and projects you don't use?  The question really becomes why do we have government, and what is it  before we can even get to the matter of taxes.      That basic selfish instinct I spoke of takes on an interesting form in social animals.  There is recognition that we're much more likely to survive in groups, which leads us to form families, communities and cou...