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I was supposed to go to a workgroup for creating comics and graphics novels today. Although it’s well known that I miss every other week because of trips to Tampa, and while I believe I had already made it known last week that I’d miss it, I’m still not 100% sure they knew I’d be gone. I had planned on calling someone to let them know, you know, just in case, but…

I told a friend I would call him after I got home last night from Tampa. It was about 10pm, and while I got home alright (a bit tired from the 4 hour drive), I didn’t. Guess I just…

When does someone stop being accountable? At what point when you say “I’ll do something” which you don’t do you stop being accountable? We’ve all forgotten about or been prevented from doing things we promised we’d do — the dishes, throwing out the trash, calling at a certain time, meeting someone somewhere — but at what point does a person go from being accountable to being someone who can’t really be counted on?

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I thought I was over playing “tag” in, you know, preschool, but apparently the Internet makes preschoolers out of even the most sophisticated adults, what with Internet memes and all. This is great, because I never wanted to leave preschool anyway.

So having been tagged by Think Artificial (run by the artificial intelligence system referring to itself as Hrafn Thorisson), I hereby now present you seven random facts about myself. (For the sake of interest I’ll try to make these facts I’ve not yet discussed on this site.)

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When traveling to the northwest of the US, it’s easy to see why people fall in love with the legend of the American west: stories abound about Indian tribes fighting it out against American soldiers, giving rise to such tragic heroes as Sitting Bull, anti-heroes like Custer, and unparalleled showmen like Buffalo Bill; outlaws and lawmen, like James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickock and Robert LeRoy Parker (a.k.a., Butch Cassidy), playing their deadly game of cat and mouse; and the Mountain Men who traded furs and lived alone in the forrests near the Rocky mountains. But while these figures are renown in their own right, the towns responsible for creating them have an air of their own, each with its own charms and annoyances.

Having just concluded a trip to both Montana and Wyoming, I thought I’d share a few quick observations on each of the places we visited. Maybe you’ll want to head up there yourself.

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I’ve been trying to write a new short story lately. I have a great title for it, but the story just isn’t coming. I know what I want to say with it, but therein the problem lies: the complexity of real life is incredibly difficult to achieve in fiction, especially short fiction. Life is so screwed up that if you actually try to create something real to life in literature it seems convoluted, contrived, and simply fake.

I suppose what I’m running into is the creation of multiple, flawed characters whose flaws are first and foremost not readily apparent, but which come into direct conflict.

Actually, when I put it like that it seems very easy. Here’s the quirk: the flaw is actually associated with a specific event. Either it’s amplified by the event (very likely), or it appears as a result of the event (unlikely) or it is embodied by some issue unrelated to the event, but which when the event occurs takes a different form of expression (which most mirrors real-life psychology).

So here’s a question for all the fiction authors out there: how do you handle this sort of interaction? How do you create characters with flaws which fall into the four standard categories [(a) flaws you know that no one knows, (b) flaws you know that everybody knows, (c) flaws others know that you don't know, and (d) flaws that you don't know that nobody knows]?

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Zombies. They’re sort of like vampires, but nowhere near as popular. Why is that? Aside from the fact that their mythology hasn’t yet been sexed up and corrupted, it’s because there’s not a lot of great zombie literature. Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War puts that excuse to rest. In short, it is to the zombie genre what Bram Stoker’s Dracula is to the vampire genre. And like with Dracula, if all zombie stories henceforth would use WWZ as a template, the literary world of the living dead will be a more enjoyable place.

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