SHADES of George Orwell and his dystopian futurist novel, 1984, that date having already passed into history, with thoughtcrimes moving from speculative literature to the movies with the adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, MINORITY REPORT. What’s next? Legislation against the use of discriminatory pronouns in thought or dream?

What this brings up for me is the issue of how much control needs to be exerted to counter extremism and weaponization today? Where is the flaw that so desperate...

REALLY — When’s the last time you had some fun. Real fun! Wild, unconstrained, giggly FUN and I don’t mean a day without news spent entirely in Meta’s cyberspace. I mean real, human-to-human fun.

Given the pandemic has challenged us to rise to a new style and level of interaction, and that we’ve completely failed to take advantage of the COVID-shot-across-the-bow to update our future infrastructure (or almost any infrastructure at all), instead returning to the state of things that...

ACCORDING to UC Berkeley statistics (https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Real-World/million.html), the following have a one in a million chance:

20 coin tosses (by me) all coming up Tails.

Winning the current California State Powerball lotto game if you buy 6 tickets a week for a year.

A major earthquake on the Hayward fault in the next 50 minutes.

One of the next 24 babies born in the U.S. will become President.

Casting the deciding vote in a California Statewide election that opinion pol...

I’M often asked in author interviews what I think makes today’s literature “contemporary.” Has it changed over the decades I’ve been authoring? The simple answer is, “Yes, it’s changed and especially so these last couple years.” There is, however, one thing that hasn’t changed: the need to appropriately address and express violence and sex, two intrinsically human issues, if not obsessions. There is so much trauma, or put in a more general way, violation, or, if you prefer, ...

HEY! I’m talking “real” writing, which means recording whatever interests the writer in any written, enduring format. It’s the first step towards authoring, which means writing for a target audience rather than oneself. I’ve been a writer, author and poet for over four decades, and it’s only recently, when I was given the opportunity of being the lead actor in The STATIC Movie (https://kspllc.media/the-static-movie) that I began to realize just how privileged I am to be part of th...

AND I don’t mean those growing consumer lines at stores for food or goods, or the long waits on the phone for customer service. I mean those lines and lines and lines of character “Will” dialog in the movie script for The STATIC Movie – https://kspllc.media -the next filming being set of for this coming Sunday at the multi-million dollar house location. I love acting as much as I do authoring (maybe a bit more when I get to do the dance choreography and get to perform it like in The S...

CORRESPONDING today with my dear friend and colleague, the multi-talented, multi-award-winning author, William Maltese, the question arose: Which is better? To think or to do? It all stems from discussing with him my having been asked to audition for a role in an upcoming made-for-television movie, “Static,” written fellow author and screenwriter Richard Rose and purchased for cinematic treatment by K. Simmons Productions (kspllc.media).

You know, “To be, or not to be? That is the ques...

IN the publishing world, a writer writes for him or herself, while an author writes for a target audience, commonly designated by a “genre.” A writer doesn’t need a publisher; an author may or may not, depending on whether one wishes to “self-publish,” or contract with a vanity or “regular” press. Usually, contracting for the first time with an established press is considered one’s author debut.

I read that in today’s market, there is no need for a regular publisher. In fac...

WRITING writings; carefully wording one’s words; creating creative stories — it’s all about judiciously avoiding the irreverent epizeuxis, pleonasm and, God(dess) forbid, semantic satiation. And doing it without losing the occasional congenial, sometimes gratifying occurrence of alliterative consonance or onomatopoeia. Rat-tat-tat went the machine gun. Quack said the duck. Forsooth mouthed the itinerant forsoother.

In truth, as an author, I do enjoy employing semantic variety — a sor...