One hundred days ago today I watched my best friend --or rather one of my best friends-- die right in front of my eyes. It was horrible. It was also a moment that changed my life forever, and I find myself in a weird mood. (more…)
Okay so I figured I might just as well write a short post to introduce what I hope will become one of the main features of this site: a section dedicated to language learning, which is one of my hobbies... and yes, I do realize that, as far as hobbies go, that one really needs to get a hobby. (more…)
A few days ago I was fooling around in Buzzfeed when something caught my eye. It was one of those silly 'can you make it through this post without spending $50.00' listicles that link to a bunch of pointless things that look cute on screen but only add to the clutter out in the real world. I usually don't even bother with those, but this time around the picture was that of a dog wearing a service dog vest, and yes, among the items they were promoting was a fake 'service dog' vest. That gave rise to a rather lively comments section that was far more interesting than the so-called article, and that comments section in turn got me thinking, especially because when I came across that debate I was already looking into the impact of the changes in the role animals play in people's lives over the...
Okay, so what could possibly have driven me to try to learn Esperanto out of all things? The short answer is that I'm not actually trying to learn the blasted thing, it's just that in order to check out duolingo (more on that in a future post), I did two things: first I took their placement quiz to see how it would grade me in a language in which I am fully fluent already, and then I signed up for a language I had never studied before. Seeing how Esperanto was conceived to be easy to learn, and hasn't had millions humans mucking up its precious regularity by doing something as unnatural as actually speaking it on a daily basis, it felt like the safest bet. So how's that little experiment going? (more…)
As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I got into a fight with my cover artist, one that not only caused me to lose one of my dearest friends, but also left me in something of a bind, as at the time I had two books that were ready to go to print, but no covers to go with them. This year, in an attempt to avoid a repeat performance, I decided to try to learn to draw. (more…)
Okay, so you have a healthy dose of curiosity, and there are about a million things you are itching to learn. Unfortunately you are also on a budget, and let's face it, learning can get expensive. Welcome to the real world. (more…)
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. I've been working on this website for a month, tinkering with countless little details, but dreading the day when I would have to tell others it actually exists. I don't know why am I so worried. I guess it's just that this is a big change. My old site was comfortable, familiar, and now I feel like I've just moved into this new house that looks nice, but where I'm not sure I know where anything is. Did I mention the fact that I hate moving? Well, I do, but it is something that I've had to do often enough. This is a different kind of move, so I'm writing a bunch of tiny posts that get deleted without ever seeing the light of day, but enough of that. The time has come for me to stop procrastinating, so tomorrow I'll let the world (or rather the three people ...
Note: what follows is a re-post of a post that was posted to booksandtales.com a couple of years ago.
Okay, so I finished a first draft and formatted it to get a general idea as to what the page count was likely to be. This is usually a fairly straight forward process, but this time around the results were kind of borderline. Font size is a known quantity, as is line spacing, but the margins are a different matter. I admit that with my longer books I try to keep them to a minimum in an attempt to keep the prices down (that extra space really adds up when you are talking about a book that’s more than three hundred pages), but at the same time I do realize that wider margins make for a far more pleasant reading experience. The thing is that while with shorter works that’s not usually ...
