Mark Paxson's Blog, page 2

Time For A Change

As I write this, I’m spending the last of four nights in the Mark Twain Room at the Bridgeport Inn. A room that is rumored to be haunted by the Lady in White. While I don’t believe in that kind of nonsense, I did have an interesting experience shortly after I got into my room […]

A Book I Just Read

Last week, Berthold Gambrel reviewed Stoner by John Williams. Here’s one way Berthold describes the book: “It is incredibly depressing. So depressing that, as I was reading it, the thought occurred to me that it could actually be in some sense dangerous. I am not prone to depression or melancholy, and yet even I was […]

The Jump is still coming

Just another reminder that my absurdist, dystopian novella, The Jump, is coming next month. Ebooks available everywhere on 9/1. Paperbacks available everywhere on 9/15. If you want to pre-order the e-book, here are the websites where you can do that. Amazon does not allow pre-orders for ebooks they don’t publish, which is why Amazon is […]

I May Be Done (SF Giants Edition)

I’ve been writing about how baseball is screwing things up for quite a while now. Well … I went to my first Giants game since the pandemic hit. I tried to go the last couple of years but something always came up to keep me away. Before the pandemic, I tried to go to a […]

A Group I’d Almost Like to See

When they came out, I owned the CDs of Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion I and II. While Guns n’ Roses had an EP, G N R Lies, that came out between those two recordings, I don’t think I ever bought the EP. But, I’m relatively sure that Guns n’ Roses had one […]

Waiting On A Package

Here’s your weekly reminder that I have a book coming out. The Jump available everywhere as an ebook on 9/1/25 and a paperback on 9/15/25. You might be asking why is the paperback not available until two weeks after the ebook. Because in my experience there can be glitches in the paperback so it just […]

Are You Ready?

— Photo courtesy of Hale Tat via unsplash.com The Jump goes live in e-book form on September 1, 2025, and paperback on September 15, 2025. The e-book is now available for pre-order at these sites, with more to come between now and September 1. If you’re a Kindle reader, Amazon does not have it available […]

Words Fail Me

If you read The Dime, you may remember a minor character from the story. A little girl named Opal, who Lily runs into when she is in a panic at the hospital where Peter lies in a bed after a brutal beating at the hands of his father. There is a story behind Opal. When […]

Why I’ll Never Believe in AI

Because it will always be controlled by humans and … well … humans are dumb. And self-interested. And evil. Let me give you some examples in other areas. Back in the 1980s, there was this wonderful word processing program called Word Perfect. It was light years better than Word. But Microsoft used its monopoly in […]

The Jump — Coming Soon

Ten years in the making, The Jump is finally about to enter the world. Ebook and paperback will be published on 9/1/25. Pre-orders for the Ebook should be available within the next week or two. (I’ll come back and remind you.) Tagline: Nothing is as it seems, everything is as it should be. Blurb: Airplanes […]