Personal news, my interests, background, and life.
This will be part of a longer personal series about conservative and being conventional — or not.
Am I conservative? And how conservative is conservative? I might have more liberal views in some areas than you know. Let’s talk about faith, religion, racism, politics, and other hot-button topics.
I’ve always enjoyed a good coming-of-age story. Generally, these are stories about young people becoming adults and are marketed to youth accordingly. But, coming-of-age stories are more than that. They’re about growing up, realizing one’s mistakes, understanding one’s self, finding truth. And those stories are not just limited to youth, both in the sense of protagonist and in the market.
Trials of divorce, unlikely challenges, and unexpected change affect us at any age. Stories of people who overcome and grow through these are not only stories of the young but of the human condition.
The primary thing I glean from coming-of-age stories?
Hope.
Hope exists for all of us, to overcome, to persevere, to make it through the trial.
And that’s not a fairy tale.
Sunlight shines on the bay waters of the Texas Gulf Coast in a unique way. I took the longer route down the coast whenever I could, eschewing the faster interstate for the smaller highways and roads, weaving my way south past nearby smaller towns like Lake Jackson, Bay City, Palacios, and Tivoli.
Laughter rebounded in the cool night air. Fiery strands of color from small fountains and other small fireworks illuminated the night, one by one, as several boys played happily on the concrete pad and in the alley behind a big red house. Fireflies added their counterpoint, blinking their lights slowly as they drifted in the breeze around us and under the big arching trees. All around us, over the treetops, larger fireworks exploded high up in the air.
Find some good reads:
Did you know I trained in a martial art off and on for a few years in my youth? From about 1991 through 1996 or so, I attended a martial arts studio in northwest Houston. Made it about halfway through to my black belt before 34 mile round-trip drives in Houston traffic after work wore on me.
More interesting than that is the founder of the martial arts studio, Grandmaster Kim Soo. What he has done counts as another American success story as far as I’m concerned. He arrived in 1968 with $50 in his pocket and made a success of his martial arts studios. Even more, he taught generations of people the values of commitment, dedication, self-control, respect, and so much more.
No news from the competition out of Glasgow. I have no idea whether they’ve accepted my short story into the anthology. Is no news bad news?
I suppose I need to sit on the story for a year, then assume they’ve foregone the rights to it? Er, I’d better go back and read the submission rules on rights.
It’s hard not to let this burn me on writing more short stories.
It’s been a rough week for writing. For one reason or another (spring break among them), I’ve not had my block of morning writing time. I did manage to squeeze in some revising, more revising, and one new scene in my Sifa and Peter novel.
The draft of the first of three parts of the novel is almost finished. I’m now thinking about some of the scenes, reworking them to build more on one another, tying them together better — hopefully.
Next week I’ll be back on schedule. Early morning bleary eyes, here I come!
Each of us has such unique taste in reading. I have no idea if you’re a fan of literary works like Moby Dick or Hamlet, nonfiction memoirs, romance novels, science fiction, or even comic books, er, graphic novels. Or even if you just skim Facebook and linked articles.
Anyway, here are a few of my favorite fiction authors you may not know.
Parking a spacecraft in orbit around another planet is a very cool experience.
I had the honor of working with some very fine people at Lockheed Martin in the early 2000’s. One of our projects was the 2001 Mars Odyssey, a spacecraft designed to orbit Mars and collect evidence of past or present water and ice. The spacecraft has also been used to relay signals from spacecraft and rovers from the surface of Mars back to Earth.
According Wikipedia’s entry, the Mars Odyssey now holds the record for the longest-serving spacecraft at Mars: 14 years, 4 months, and 3 days from the launch on April 7th, 2001.
Go Odyssey!