Bricks Without Straw

I just returned from a little six-day holiday in Oregon, where moody grey days are offset by brilliant sunny ones and the constant breeze freshens your skin with salty air. It wasn't a perfect vacation - no matter where I go, work seems to haunt me like a zombie corpse - but I did manage to finish reading Peter Straub's A Dark Matter and then got well into Jo Nesbo's Nemesis . (I like a wide variety of reading material; what can I say?)

It's been a very, very long time coming, but I've just signed the contract for TRAJECTORY, to be published by Anarchy Books later this year.

Well, this is a first for me. I've resisted blogging for so long, hoping, I guess, that the medium would be just another passing fad. Ah, wrong again, it would seem. Why "Bricks Without Straw"? First, because if there's a hard way to do something, I'll probably find it. You see, in old-time brick-making, you could not make strong bricks without adding organic material like straw. When Pharaoh tells the Israelites they must gather their own straw, and still produce the same output of bricks every day, Moses complains, but the complaint resolves nothing. The idiom " bricks without straw " implies having to do something without appropriate resources. Second, when we were forming Metaformix Information Systems Inc. back in 1999, "Bricks From Straw Software" was one of the proposed names. So, while that wasn't really a saying in its own right, the idea behind it was that having "the right straw" we could help you "make bric...