Life continues to be a rollercoaster lately, and my hopes for 2008 being more calm and settled seem to be hopeless right now. What helps things is that there is some good news along with the bad, but really, I could use some regularity.

Bad news first:

My mother has cancer. I hesitated posting about this because it’s personal, but it’s happening and it’s a big part of my life right now, and it will continue to be so for the coming months. She has adenocarcinoma of the lung and she’s started chemotherapy.

It was a shock at first, but right now the family is being optimistic. Because we have to be, and because my mother needs that. She’s a trooper. She is adamant that she’s going to beat this thing and she’s being strong. How can we be anything less?

The chemo is rough, though, and she’s only now experiencing the first effects. But she has support – all of us and her friends and I hope that it will make a difference.

I am not a religious person, but I would appreciate people’s thoughts, and indeed prayers, if you feel like it.

The good news:

I was accepted to the <a href=”http://www.clarionwest.org/”>Clarion West Writer’s Workshop</a> and, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I will be attending this summer.

Clarion is something I’ve thought about for a long time and gone back and forth about in the past. Oftentimes work was uncooperative, or my financial situation. This year I’ve run out of excuses. And I want to go. I feel like I need to go. So, I am.

I’m really looking forward to it. Chuck Palahniuk is one of the instructors, so is Connie Willis. It should be a great time. And I will be following in the footsteps of some of my friends – Eugene and Erin and Kris and many others.

So, wish me luck.

Also, advice would be appreciated.

More to come later…

If you are familiar with Sybil’s Garage you know that it is a brilliant magazine of fiction and poetry, publishing imaginative and evocative work of the fantastic. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s time you changed that.

Sybil’s Garage 5 is now out with fiction from Jason Erik Lundberg, Veronica Schanoes, Vylar Kaftan, and more. Full information for the issue can be found here, and you can buy it right from that page as well. I highly recommend it.

Yet again I return after a long absence. I truly intend to post to this thing, and then things come up. Lately it’s been work which has been busy, and other things, which I may go into at a later point.

Work, however, has been a bit of a shock to the system after taking it easy for a few months.

One of the most frustrating things, however, has been the return to Microsoft Windows. I’ve been a Mac user at home for years now, and I suppose I’ve become used to them. They still freeze up from time to time, and I have application difficulties, of course, but they are generally infrequent.

My work computer, however, is a Windows machine. And it’s fair to say that I have issues on a daily basis. Issues with web pages, issues with applications freezing, issues with the OS not loading right on startup. I realize that some of this may result from the way work set up my computer, but it’s incredibly frustrating.

I recently installed Windows on my Mac, so it will be interesting to see how that stacks up against my experience with the work machine. I mostly use it for single programs that don’t work on the Mac. Or for old games I have, so it won’t get a workout, but I wonder what the comparison will be.

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I seem to be going through a nostalgia period. Because of a conversation that I had on the writing retreat, I dug out my Dragonlance Chronicles books and I’m reading through them. It’s a bit tedious – there are chapters that I end up skimming because there’s nothing really there to draw me in, but I’m determined to go through the whole thing. I think I read them originally when I was 11 or 12, and while my adult eye finds a lot wrong with the writing, the worldbuilding and the story still has a certain something for me, despite the fact that it was based on D&D adventures and is hopelessly derivative of Tolkien and other works.

I’m also playing older games. After installing Windows, as mentioned above, I found my old PC games – stuff like Baldur’s Gate. A lot of the older games don’t work with the new, update operating system, but some do, and I’m enjoying going back and playing them.

I’ve realized that while I enjoy games in general, it’s the story behind the games that draw me in. I seem to be happiest when the button smashing is kept to a minimum and I am responsible for higher level decisions. That’s one of the things I appreciated about the Knights of the Old Republic series. I could direct the characters to do certain things, but then they did them on their own.

On the other hand, I don’t like strategy games that much. I guess I’m full of contradictions.

Of course I rarely play just one game all the way through. Over the last couple of weeks, I have played Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Super Metroid, Gears of War, Jade Empire, Baldur’s Gate and possibly one or two others.

It’s a great distraction.

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Writing-wise, I haven’t done much lately. Just can’t get my head into it. Aside from some future novel scribblings and some revision, I haven’t really submerged myself into any stories. Hopefully I’ll get over that hump this weekend.

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For various reasons, I’m going (and I know I’ve said this before) to try to post more regularly. I want to get into the habit of posting more often, if I can.

So – more to come later…