A speculative mind

  I just finished watching the second season of The Umbrella Academy . For those who don’t know, The Umbrella Academy is based on a Comic book series by Gerard Way. In the story, dozens of women around the world suddenly give birth on the same day. This in itself would not be unusual except for the fact that none of them had not been pregnant up to the time of delivery. An eccentric millionaire travels the world to adopt as many of these children as he can, believing there to be something special about these children. He is able to adopt seven of the children and it turns out that each one has their own super power. This all happens in like the first fifteen minutes of the first episode, and things just get weirder from then on as we follow the now adult children as they come to terms with their own screwed up lives, which is mostly caused by their screwed up adoptive father. I watched the first season with glee and looked forward to the second, which did not disappoint. I said this

                                                                                              (Picture by Dina Dee)   I thought I would give you a snippet from my next novel. This is the first chapter of Renfield's Dream : Prelude Full of vexation come I -Egeus-   Something horrific had happened. She knew it. She had felt it. The blackness seeped into her mind as the car proceeded down the back roads. Too long. Too much time. Time. The car rumbled and bounced unevenly. She barely noticed as she steeled herself for what was to come. The driver took her as far as he could down the broken lane. The car came to a stop and he looked back at her, apologetically. She put on her hat and dark glasses, got out of the car and looked down the lane. Huge furrows rent the road as if a giant had swiped it with his claws. No one would be driving on this road for a while. She motioned for the driver to go back the way from which he had come. He started to protest that he could not leave

  This week in Oregon we have had unprecedented wildfires. On Monday night we had a hot east wind blow across the state. As the night wore on, the winds got stronger and stronger and the temperature got higher and higher. At 6:30 PM it was 61 degrees with calm winds. By 9:00 it was 81 degrees and we would have up to 45 MPH gusts the rest of the night. Thick smoke rolled in and all day on Tuesday we were in semi darkness. The street lights never went off.   It was surreal. By Wednesday it was just plain scary. Five towns were burned to the ground and many more were threatened. 500,000 people were under evacuation orders. We don’t know what the final loss of life is going to be yet. The legendary wildfire in Oregon that is in all the history books is the Tillamook Burn from 1933. Everybody in Oregon has heard about the Tillamook Burn. It burned 350,000 acres of forest land. In the past week One Million acres has burned in Oregon. This, as bad as it is, is just a sampling of what Califo

Cue Juliet: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. Juliet is saying names don’t matter. If we called this plant a dung bucket instead of a rose, it wouldn’t change anything. It would still look and smell pretty. What we call something is unimportant.   Juliet was wrong. Names are important. Names are often the first thing we learn of someone. They can help to convey an initial emotional attachment. Look at some of the names that Dickens chose for his characters: Chuzzlewit, Cratchit, Fagin, Fezziwig, Grimwig, Honeythunder, Pardiggle, Pecksniff, Scrooge, Tulkinghorn. Without knowing anything about these characters, you can get some sort of feeling about them just from their names.   One can overdo this of course, it is not good to get overly descriptive with the names unless you are aiming for farce. But names should be carefully considered. They should add to, or at least not detract from the narrative. When I