C.K. Combs's Blog, page 9
May 24, 2018
I was on a Podcast!
I was recently part of a podcast panel discussion on Trans rights and what allies can do to be, well, allies. The District 34 podcast is hosted by Tina-Desiree Berg (who happens to be one of my brothers’ best friends).
The panelists were me, a trans guy; Kayleigh McKee a trans woman and voice-over artist; Wee Heavy, a nonbinary identified board member with SPEEC (Sex Positive Education and Event Center) in Portland, OR. Topics ranged from our gender discovery journeys, TERFs, why Caitlin Je...
April 25, 2018
Thinking About Creativity
I listened to a podcast this morning called The Writer Files; the specific episode was called The Best of ‘The Writer’s Brain’ Part One: Creativity. The guest was neuroscientist Michael Gybko and addressed creativity as a brain function. They also talked about ideas on how a person could increase their creativity.
The gist of it for me was that creativity is about making novel and unique connections between dissimilar objects, issues or concepts in new and novel ways. This connection could...
April 20, 2018
The Legend of Whoberus
[image error]Anyone with a passing knowledge of Greek mythology has heard of Cerberus, the three-headed dog (though some accounts describe him as having many more heads than that and not all canine, this is not the story I am here to share). What many do not know is that Cerberus was not an only child. His immortal father, snake-headed Typhon, also had other multi-headed offspring. There was the Chimera, who had the heads of a lion, a goat and a snake and the Lernaean Hydra, with multiple snake-heads, an...
March 14, 2018
It’s Pi Day!!!!
Pi, Pie, πππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππ
I get very excited about my birthday, which is today, because it is a super nerdy day and also because I share this birthday with Albert Einstein. Which makes it even super nerdier.
If you’d like to celebrate with me, eat some pie today. Any kind of pie. What’s your favorite?
How may digits of pi can you recite? I’m up to 30 and working up to 36 today. 36 happens to be my age in Hex.
3.14159265358979323846264338327950...
February 26, 2018
Be Like a Weed
[image error]The book, Writing Past Dark, by Bonnie Friedman has plenty of interesting things to chew on. It’s not your typical book about writing. This is more the book about the demons we wrestle with while writing. While not writing. In order to write, etc.
She talks about the way our writing can be strangled by too much self-awareness:
If, while writing, you must always be proving that you write well, the writing will suffer.”
If we pay too much attention to the fact that we’re writing, we’ll fuck...
February 19, 2018
Fearing our Creations
[image error]In the book, Writing Past Dark, Bonnie Friedman examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a metaphor for what she sees as a common source of blockage for writers – the fear of our creation. In Frankenstein, young Victor pursues his passion obsessively and alienates his family. The knowledge he seeks has greater importance than their fears or needs. He yearns to ‘author’ fresh life.
He accomplishes his goal but at the moment of conception, when his creation opens its eyes, Frankenstein is hor...
February 11, 2018
It looks like I’m not doing anything
[image error]My family has an uneven track record for giving me space while I’m writing. I get better results when I retreat to my writing grotto in the basement, but sometimes I want to be above ground, enjoying radiation from the sun. Once I’m visible, I’m vulnerable to interruption. Having some kind of writing artifacts in front of me sometimes helps – I can gesture to my notebook or printed pages and say, “I’m working now, can I get back to you?” It would help if I were more consistent about that, ra...
November 30, 2017
Buddy’s Story: Goodbye, Kitty
[image error]Once upon a time (2013), I started writing a story about a butch dyke named Buddy who leaves the small town they grew up in and heads to the big city. I started the story during one NaNoWriMo and continued it a year later during the next one. This project has been sitting on my virtual shelf since 2014.
The other day I got a great suggestion from Mol, who said I should dust off the Buddy story and present it as a serial on this blog. Great idea, I said, but I want to write a new beginning....
October 22, 2017
Where Did That Come From?
[image error]I have been a fan of science fiction for a long, long time. I love and respect the genre and its masters so much that I have felt intimidated about the prospect of writing within it. I’ve tried a few times, one story was submitted to the now-defunct erotic magazine, Salacious for their sci-fi edition. That volume never made it to press.
At any rate, I’ve been thinking a lot about trying my hand with sci-fi again recently, inspired by a book of short stories I’m reading by Isaac Asimov called...
Between Worlds
[image error]She woke with a start, gazing around with a confused expression.
“Where is this? What’s going on?” She asked in a voice rough from lack of use.
I stood up and came to her bedside. “You’re on the Zephretti in the infirmary. Or what passes for it on a freighter.”
The girl, who had been unconscious and fighting a fever for several days, shook her head. “No, this isn’t right, how’d I get here?”
I handed her a glass of water with a straw. “You’ve been sick since we left the mining station. You...
