Kurt R.A. Giambastiani's Blog, page 68

Finding the Joy

A reader’s question on a recent post made me think a bit. Is writing an escape from my day job, or is my day job an escape from writing? At first thought I said, “Why, that’s easy!” but then I thought again. My writing “career” has had three distinct phases, so far: Apprentice Writer Professional […]

My Bay of San Pablo

The moon is only first quarter, but the tide was low as my bus drove into Seattle. The cool breeze off the Sound brought in that parfum de la mer–a mixture of salt, sea, and tideflat–that sends me a half century back in time. I took a deep breath, a slow breath, and I stepped […]

Shifting Gears

Clutch!Clutch!Clutch! Nearly all my adult life, I’ve driven stick. I know how to shift gears. My wife brought the first manual transmission into my life–a Mercury Capri, which we called “the Crappy.” It was It was a pop-eyed old beater with one headlight bigger than the other so it always looked like it was giving […]

Old Man Gamer – PS3 Edition

Video games rarely surprise me. Disappoint me? Often. Surprise me? Rarely. Journey, a PS3 game from Sony and thatgamecompany, surprised me. First off, it’s rated E (Everyone) which usually means one of two things: good old-fashioned family fun or cartoon characters and jaunty tunes. This is neither. The plot of Journey is simple: you are […]

Poaching Time Trials

Yes, I can get a bit…obsessed…at times. My good friends over at Cheap Seat Eats blog turned me on to a videoin which Wylie Dufresne shows a new way to poach an egg. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know I’ve been working to perfect the various methods of cooking the venerable […]

Tricksy Compliments

I’ve run across a couple of phrases this past week that initially read opposite from their intent. In an anniversary card, my dad said, “It’s not as easy as you make it seem.” On first reading, I took it to mean that we were making it harder than it should be. A second reading cleared […]

Grand Openings

Stephen King has spoken. Again. This time, he speaks in an interview in The Atlantic (that reads more like an essay) about a topic not covered in his On Writing memoir: Opening lines. I hope aspiring writers read all of what he said, instead of picking their favorite sound bite. It’s not that the first […]

New Contact Form

Just an FYI for regular readers… I’ve added a “Contact” page and form to the blog; you should be able to see it up there on the menu (far right). Feel free to use it to submit questions, feedback, general comments, requests for topics and/or recipes, and other such. Thanks, k

Fasten Your Seatbelts

This week I came across two articles for writers that I thought I’d pass along. The first article comes from my friends over at The Noble Deadwebsite. Barb and J.C. Hendee are bestselling authors with nearly a score of books to their collective credit. J.C. is also their webmaster, and trust me, he knows his […]

In Lieu of Flowers

People used to send flowers. My mother died when I was five, so my memories of the house at that time are sketchy and incomplete. Iremember with clarity that awful day when I learned the news, a congregation of black in our kitchen and living room, and the nightmares that tormented me through the following […]