J. Timothy King Stories that Expand Your Life™

Missy Frye has graciously allowed me to give away a copy of the Love-Idiot book in order to support the “Just Write Blog Carnival,” which has published numerous links to my own articles and stories.

This is just the first in a large number of giveaways happening across the Internet over the coming weeks. I’ll post more later.

-TimK

P.S. If you’d like to give away a copy of one of my books, please contact me and let me know. There are still some as of yet unallocated.  Click to continue »

Driving up the Maine Turnpike this weekend, I took pause from, of all things, the landscape. Not just from the beauty of it, but I got a feeling that it was distinctly American. In Maine, the culture still retains some of the human community values that I often associate with the original Americans. And for just a moment, I could imagine myself dwelling on the unpaved American landscape, with pride.

I wondered what would have happened, had those of our progenitors not been decimated by disease in the 18′th century, how different might our history have turned out. And I promised myself I’d think about writing an epic fantasy or SF story about it, with a fictional people locked in the same conflict, facing the same issues. And then I discovered that Holly Lisle had written than story.

Actually, I don’t know yet that Holly has written the same story I wanted to write. I only know that over the weekend, I had a great deal of time to read. I picked up Talyn, which I had just started. And I found as the story developed that Holly was exploring many of the same issues I wanted to explore, and from a similar perspective. And I found that she had done so by creating a fictional world rich in history, culture, and human need.

And magic. In the world of Korre, where Talyn lives, people use magic as technology. Talyn herself is one of the Magics, a person who has a talent for magic, and in her job as a Shielder, she protects her tāak and her country from the magic attacks of the Eastils.  Click to continue »

Photo © 2008 Ed Yourdon CC BY-SA 2.0

Alan Baxter posted this list last week, and it’s still making the rounds.

“And before anyone accuses me,” Alan writes, “of being all jaded and defeatist, I prefer to look at it as arming myself with the truth in order to beat that f***er down and prove every point on this list wrong.”

He’s talking about superstar authors, who “prove every single one of these points wrong.” They’re the exceptions that prove the rule.

Or are they?

Top 10 Reasons Maybe to Be a Writer

10. For the chicks. I can’t speak to this, because I married my Beloved before I started calling myself “a writer.” What I do know is that I notice a lot more friendly women now than when I was just a software developer. And I’ve even caught women talking about how good I look over Twitter or Facebook. And I gotta tell ya, that feels kinda kewl.

Of course, most writers are heterosexual women who indeed aren’t in it for the chicks.

9. For a sense of self-worth. The almost constant rejection of trying to get published is, I agree, not good for one’s perception of one’s worth. There’s a simple solution to that: stop trying to “get published.” The desire to “get published” is root to all kinds of writing evil. (Compare “money” below.)  Click to continue »

Scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, "A Fistful of Datas"

Now that I have some money coming in, one of my top items to get is an ebook reader. And in my typical style, I began thinking of all the ways I’d love to use such a device to help me in my work. Unfortunately, in my typical style, no reader out there does most of what I would want to do.

I realized that what I really wanted was one of those PADDs they have on Star Trek. It can work as an independent device that you can use to read or write content. But it also seamlessly integrates with the main computer system, to retrieve and store data and to share content with others.

For example, in the episode “A Fistful of Datas,” the Enterprise computer’s directories become corrupted, such that when you try to access a file, it turns up with the wrong data. Picard tries to listen to his Mozart trio, and the computer instead plays a selection from Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances. And when some crew members try to rehearse Beverley’s play, their PADDs instead show the lines from Data’s poetry. The PADDs are obviously pulling data directly from the Enterprise’s computer memory, as needed.

In other episodes, we see characters do the converse, select something on a PADD and then seamlessly shift to a computer console to complete a task. That’s the sort of thing that would be useful for me.  Click to continue »

Photo © 2008 Emanuele Rosso CC 2.0 BY NC ND

Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. On August 6, I posted a story about a date gone bad.

Of the rest of the stories that were posted Friday, here are my…

#FridayFlash Favorites for August 6

I found an even 100 stories (including the 80 that made it onto the official #FridayFlash Report for August 6). Of those, here are my 8 favorites, listed with my 3 favorite authors first. (That is, the #FridayFlash authors who have most often appeared in these favorites lists.)

• “Noodle” by Neil Shurley — You can’t escape who you are, and you probably don’t really want to.

• “His Shirt is Orange” by Leah Petersen — I can sympathize. My Little One doesn’t even want to grow up. But no force in the universe can stop her.  Click to continue »

I’ve been absent, as you may know, because my computer’s mainboard died, and I’ve been busy with a new software contract, and our only working car stopped working, and then my computer’s hard drive died. (Yes, I’m getting tired of it all.) As a result, I hadn’t had have much time to write over part of June and the whole of July, and I truly missed writing. (But that’s another blog post.) I also didn’t have time to read, and I missed it, too. Now that life is returning to kinda-normal, I’ve finished reading Truffles by the Sea, which I loved, and A Time to Tell.

One of the beneficial side-effects of the software contract, of course, is that I have the money to do something I’ve wanted to for some time: an Internet-wide book give-away. I’m in the process of contacting numerous book bloggers, asking each if she’d like to give away a copy of one of my books. I can mail the books to the winners, but I need bloggers to host the giveaways and choose the winners. I don’t know that I’ll ever do a giveaway of this scale ever again. If you’d like to be included, please contact me and let me know.  Click to continue »

I’m staring at her animated features from across a half-eaten slab of flounder and a mostly-empty glass of Chardonnay. She drones on. Still pretty as when I first met her, but I wonder if I were to choke on an errant bone if it would give me an excuse…

No such luck.

You wouldn’t think it possible that any one person could know this much about Magnum, P.I. Much to my surprise, you would be wrong. I bet she could recite every word of the script of every episode by heart. Apparently, she maintains her own very complete “Nitpicker’s Guide to Magnum, P.I.” site on the web. I say “apparently,” because I haven’t seen it myself. Probably only two or three people in the universe have. I chuckle at the thought. I guess the chuckle is well-timed, because she doesn’t seem offended.

Rather, she nods enthusiastically. “Really!” Her eyebrows shoot up, eyes wide. “No kidding!”

“But what bugs me most,” she says, “is how he always lets people walk all over him.”

I’m not as expert as she is, but I recall Magnum as a hard-boiled, Vietnam vet, an ’80′s TV private-eye, fearless and shrewd, the sort of guy who could whoop ass in a bar-fight but knows better than to get into one. Don’t let any of that give pause to her tirade. I guess the good-looking, sensitive, Hawaiian-surf image works even in the 21′st century.  Click to continue »

Photo © 2007 dasroofless CC 2.0 BY NC ND

Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. On July 30, I didn’t post anything for #FridayFlash, because I was still recovering from my life blowing apart (although I did start on a story). Most of my time and mental energy has been taken up with a new software contract I’m on. But I’m hoping to do some serious writing in August.

#FridayFlash Favorites for July 30

There were 111 stories (including the 85 that made it onto the official #FridayFlash Report for July 30). Of all those, here are my 7 favorites, listed in no particular order.

• “Two-Week Notice” by Michelle Frank — What we’re willing to leave, in order to obtain autonomy.

• “Something In The Attic” by Icy Sedgwick — A little girl, an attic, and the quest for forbidden knowledge.

• “Contact” by Neil Shurley — Yeah, when we say “evidence” of alien life, this is what we mean.  Click to continue »

Photo © 2006 David M* CC 2.0 BY NC

Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. On July 23, I didn’t post anything for #FridayFlash, because I was still recovering from my life blowing apart. (I also didn’t post anything today, although I did start on a story.) Most of my time and mental energy has been taken up with a new software contract I’m on. But now that I’m on the ground running on the project, I should have some brain cells free to do some serious writing over the next month.

More immediately, today I sent in my first invoice, and I gotta tell ya, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many digits after the dollar sign (except on my credit-card bill). As a thank-you to God and the universe, I’m planning an Internet-wide Monster Book Give-away next month, hundreds of copies of my short memoir Love through the Eyes of an Idiot and From the Ashes of Courage, the first Ardor Point novel. The give-away is still in the initial planning stages, but if you have a blog and you’d like to give away a copy of one of these books, please contact me and let me know, and I’ll add you to the list.

With no further ado: of the #FridayFlash stories that were posted, here are my…  Click to continue »

Photo © 2009 helix90 CC 2.0 BY NC ND

This is the second post in my getting-caught-up for #FridayFlash Favorites.

Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. On July 16, I didn’t post anything for #FridayFlash, because my life was in the midst of blowing apart.

Of the #FridayFlash stories that were posted over the last two Fridays (besides my own), here are my…

#FridayFlash Favorites for July 16

There were more stories posted on July 16 than on most weeks, 112 stories (including the 88 that made it onto the official #FridayFlash Report for July 16). Of all those, here are my 8 favorites, listed in no particular order.

• “Lars Rehnquist Is Always Wrong” by David Garrett — This humorous tale reminds me, in a serious way, of the Native American philosophy that we are all a part of the living world around us. Maybe we should all give thanks to the living things who die to give us nourishment.  Click to continue »