If anyone is actually reading this blog, you may be wondering why it’s taken me so long to finish Northwest Passage.  Well, the honest answer is that I have been very distracted by a lot of things in life this last year.  My daughter is getting to that point in her interest in soccer as a sport that we are spending a lot of time and money getting her to a competitive league that will give her a chance in a couple years to be scouted by college coaches.  My son has enlisted in the National Guard, attended Basic Training and AIT, graduated High School and is about to start college (IF we can get the brilliant strategists in the college financial office and the efficient public servants in the National Guard to get on the same page…pardon me, had to wipe a bit of sarcasm off my chin).

At the same time, there’ve been some personal issues that have hit our family—my wife’s father has been in ill health and various financial issues that are too mundane and boring to detail have dragged me away from the keyboard.

Now, finally, I am over 80,000 words into Northwest Passage, and I BELIEVE I am less than 20,000 words away from being finished.  I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I am making a commitment to finishing this thing within the next few weeks.

Sorry it took so long.

If you are like me and have a list of writers that you consider greats in the field of science fiction and fantasy, I would urge you to not follow their Facebook page.  I just looked up one SF writer who I had considered very erudite, and funny while also being able to string together some quite gripping action sequences.  He’s a liberal, but a lot of old-school sf writers from the 60s and 70s are, but he’s a raging, raving rabble-rouser that doesn’t just believe conservatives are wrong or misguided or even ignorant…they’re all EVIL.  It’s interesting how people of his philosophy are quick to say that right and wrong is relative and determined by society, until they come across someone who believes differently from them politically…THEN that person should be killed or thrown in jail.

I have a lot less respect for this writer as a man and a human being than I had a few minutes ago…

Sad news today about the murder of four US Marines in Chatanooga, TN by a jihadist Kuwaiti immigrant.  It’s still early, but the most likely scenario is another impressionable Muslim youth radicalized by ISIS propaganda.

This is, unfortunately, what happens when there’s a war being fought but only one side is actually fighting it.

I originally intended to avoid political commentary on this blog, but I am getting pissed off regarding the editorializing about the attempted terrorist attack in Garland, TX.

The party line seems to be that it’s the fault of the people who put on the Mohammed cartoon contest…”dangerous extremists” in the words of one editorializing moron in the USA Today.  They were being “deliberately provocative” and inviting violence.

Leaving aside the obvious comparisons to accusations that scantily clad women “invite rape,” which is equally idiotic, why are we holding Muslims to such a lower standard?  When Robert Maplethorpe created his “artwork” “Piss Christ,” which was the incredibly inventive and thoughtful dunking of a crucifix in a jar of urine, no Christians shot up the studio where it was displayed.  When Chris Ofili displayed his “Holy Virgin” painting, which depicts Mary basically covered in feces, no Christians bombed the place it was displayed.  And neither man was told they were inviting violence and putting innocent people in danger because no one seriously believed that Christians would kill random strangers over the insults.

So why do we assume that Muslims will?  Why do we insult the vast majority of Muslims by assuming that any insult to their religion will result in violence?  How is that a “progressive” position?

Have not heard back from the gentleman who was working on my audio book in a few weeks now.  Either he has decided it’s not worth it and not bothered to notify me or he’s run into trouble of some kind and is unable to get in touch.

Either way, it’s looking more doubtful that this audio book is going to come to pass any time soon and the only thing I am grateful for is that I didn’t sink more than a couple hundred bucks into it as a downpayment.

The audio version of Duty, Honor, Planet is more than half complete.  I’m hoping it won’t be but a few more weeks.

Just spent some time going over pronunciations and such with the narrator for the audio version of Duty, Honor, Planet. He should be knocking it out very soon!

I saw Interstellar, Chris Nolan’s new film, last night with my teenage son and we both really enjoyed it.  It was one of the finest examples I’ve seen of literary SF—classic literary SF–translated to film.  It was very well done and if you want to see more intelligent, thoughtful SF movies, you should go support this one.

Wow, the promotion was much more successful this time than last:  nearly 5000 downloads in the five days as opposed to about 2700 last time!