Bricks Without Straw

Thanks, Morpheus Tales, for picking up my story, KILLING WALLACE CRAWTON, which is tentatively scheduled to appear in e-book format in MT #19 (January 2013). This is one of my favorite stories to-date, partly because I wrote it shortly after reading TRUE GRIT, and partly because it fills in some history for my fictional town, Mill Town, Ontario, which figures in several stories (both horror and literary). You can read a bit about KILLING WALLACE CRAWTON here, in a post I made just after writing it in May, 2011.

It was a somewhat cloudy, cold Friday. By mid-afternoon, temperatures in Toronto were hovering around -12 C. I remember the quality of light that afternoon, but not the temperature. I remember the confused worry on my mother's face when my father drove up in the family car - a green 1958 Mercury Meteor with foul-smelling vinyl upholstery that gave me headaches on hot summer days - hours before he was normally expected. I remember his downcast expression as he came up the front steps, a load of reference books under his arm.

The free Morpheus Tales Christmas Horror Special is out now, with a fine selection of Christmas-themed horror, including my own Ye Merry Gentlemen . Read at ISSUU   or download the PDF !

This past weekend, after having received an Internet-enabled Blu-Ray player for my birthday, I decided to explore the possibility of using an old Wireless G router (Linksys WRT-54G) as a wireless bridge to connect the player to our Internet connection without having to run 40 feet of cable from where the Blu-Ray player is to where the current router is. It actually went surprisingly well.

1) The weather: I know, I know, there is nothing I can really do about the weather, and I know that global warming's main effect is to cause radical changes to weather pattens regionally, but it doesn't mean I can't be bothered by it, so today, I find it bothering me.

After listening to the first episode of the " A Pixel Canvas " podcast, I decided to seek out and boldly go where few near-seniors have ever gone - straight to the Minecraft website. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to navigate the landscape, dig, create blocks and then destroy them, but not long enough to frustrate those with low attention spans. The problem with Minecraft is simply this: It is so incredibly addictive that you can easily lose yourself playing a game that is at its essence nothing more than a virtual building-block set similar to the wood-block sets many of us used as infants and young children. Perhaps this is why it is so incredibly soothing . The music, too, is soothing, so the entire experience - blue, lightly-clouded sky, verdant fields - is engaging because it becomes a meditative exercise in a pointless activity. It's a good way to get into your "Zen thing". It is not so much a game as a creative play set, like Meccano to...

Robert Charles Wilson's new book, Vortex , wraps up his Spin trilogy. More connected to Axis than Spin , Vortex brings together multiple intertwining histories that lead ultimately to the discovery of the truth about the "Hypotheticals", and the eventual end of the known universe. Or does it? (Spoiler alert.)