Archives for November 2022

Brother, where art thou?

November 18, 2022 By James Leave a Comment

It’s hard to be unique in Las Vegas. Much more so at a conference in Vegas for indie writers attended by costumed witches, aliens, and fairies. Hell, I saw Batman walking the floor, too.

I couldn’t imagine that two non-costumed authors could come close to being unique in this environment.

I was wrong.

Our unique aspect has nothing to do with wardrobe and makeup; it has to do with being brothers. Two author brothers seemed to raise as many brows as the green-eyed pixie or the Han Solo impersonator.

Rob is my youngest brother and convinced me from the 2021 floor of the 20Booksto50K show that I should be there walking the seminars with him.

This year we did.

Rob and I share a lot of things, family being the most obvious, but also a love of writing and music and intended puns. But we’re also ridiculously different. I’m East coast and live 5 minutes from Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. He’s West coast and lives 5 minutes from Puget Sound just south of the Canadian border in Washington. He chose a teaching career. I chose the Navy.

When it comes to our writing passions, I love to write. OK, we both do. I like to write Sci-Fi Adventure and Mystery. Rob writes Apocoloptimistic Sci-Fi (His description not mine) and is the freak who loves to market his ideas. Together? Well, that’s what this week was about. Rob and I have only met up incidentally throughout our professional careers, so spending a week together was a learning experience.

Rob has a lot of things going for him. A solid sense of direction is not one of them. When he picked me up from the airport and drove back to Bally’s (with the help of smart phone navigation, no less) I didn’t expect a guided tour that crisscrossed downtown Vegas multiple times. I did enjoy the one I got, though.

And while the strategy of Just Follow Me on our way to and from dinner sparked countless shared memories and creative conversations, according to my watch, it also sparked a looping route that logged 6.37 miles.

My feet are still throbbing.

It’s true, Rob doesn’t always know where he’s going, and if we’re being truthful, do any of us? Reconnecting and rediscovering has been great this week, and we’ve agreed. We don’t know where we’re going, but together, we’re going to figure it out.

Frontier Kindness

November 16, 2022 By James Leave a Comment

Frontier. Not the final. The airline. The final frontier? Yes, that’s already taken. Not that I wouldn’t put it past myself to heist it in a creative way.

But not today.

Today, Frontier Airlines was kind. The counter agent advised me that I could save $25 if I returned to the kiosk and printed my bag tag myself. Otherwise, she’d have to charge me. I was surprised. Based on how she reacted to my puzzled look, I guessed it wasn’t the first one she’d seen today, even though it was 5:30.

In the morning.

So I thanked her, printed my ticket and checked my bag, and thought about all the things I could do with that $25. That didn’t take long, and this time I wasn’t surprised.

Today, Frontier was another type of kind, too. Kind of late. I didn’t want to suppose they’d deduced I was on vacation; that I was on my way to a writer’s conference; and that sometimes the key to great writing is forced isolation. In today’s digital environment of big data, AI, and machine learning, all of that was within the realm of possibility.

But that would be scary. Too scary for a Monday morning, anyway.

What they did and didn’t know about me is beside the point. The point is they were kind enough to provide just that. Forced isolation. According to the app that provided me with my flight update, it was to be an estimated 114 minutes. Not even 100 minutes or a rounded two hours. 114 minutes.

With all that computing power, you’d think they could figure out what the word “estimate” means.

Anyway. 114 minutes of forced isolation with 100s of my fellow travelers, all wanting to be someplace they’re not. Well, most of them.

Me?

It gave me the time to think about frontiers from my perspective. It’s about transitioning from my current full-time job to my next one. But James, aren’t you already a writer? OK. You got me there. The key word there is full-time.

I know. That’s two keywords. Here are two more: keep reading.

So, yeah. I’m kind of delayed on my way to where I want to be. Upset? Hardly. I leave that to the baby two rows over who’s insisting at the top of her lung capacity that the airport is not the kind of place a baby should be first thing on a Monday morning.

For writers, our perspective is a little bit different.

Kind of.