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Posts by Cedar Sanderson

Sep 22

28 Comments

Off the Rails

I’m crossing my fingers while writing this that the internet will hold on long enough for me to post it. Since the Great Outage, I’ve bought a new router, jumped through more network hoops than I care to think about, worked ten hours a day at the day job with the exception of the day I drove the Junior Mad Scientist into the city for an appointment, and even that day I didn’t arrive home until late, and had dental work done. Still, the ‘net is iffy at best. Today, it is hoped, a technician shall arrive and figure it out, because I’m stymied.

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Sep 15

28 Comments

In Which the Writer is Netless

I’m sitting on the porch to write this. It’s a lovely morning, just a touch of cool, not enough to make me want a sweater, just a beautiful late-summer morning promising a warm day later. So why am I on the porch, not at my desk? Welll…. and why didn’t I write this last night, which I had every intention of doing on my way home from work? Well…

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Sep 8

17 Comments

Reprint: Happily Ever After

This post was originally published at Cedarwrites on Nov 8, 2014. Sorry about the repeat, guys, but the Daughter-thing has a physical therapy appointment at 7 am on a Saturday. And I was down with a migraine yesterday. Someday I’ll have the eptitude to write the posts ahead further, but this week was not that week. On the other hand, I have been chugging away at fiction…  Read more

Sep 1

27 Comments

Createspace is No More

There’s been rumors flying about this for some time, now, but the email I got from Createspace earlier this week cemented the reality – that particular publish-on-demand model is done and gone in just a few weeks. There’s nothing on the Createspace website yet, but I’m not sure that has been updated in months if not years. So where does this leave the newly fledged publish-on-demand marketplace? That remains to be seen. It does not, however, leave Indie Authors like myself high and dry. I have all my print books through them, but the email they sent is reassuring.  Read more

Aug 25

91 Comments

Flinch Training

In our polarized world, we are facing a constant onslaught of messages. From the practical of ‘look both ways before you cross the street‘ to the insane gaslighting of ‘glyphosate causes cancer‘ we’re bombarded at every turn. It’s on the news, on the internet, and in our fiction. We can’t escape it, it seems.

My Dad adopted a dog a few years ago while I was still living with him on the Farm. The young dog he’d adopted was about a year old, and a farm collie (appropriately enough), and he was a rescue dog. That last part was the problematic bit. You see, Wade had been born and raised on a farm down South somewhere, with his big dog family, and one little old man. When the man died, the dogs were left alone, roaming the farm, lost and confused. Read more

Aug 18

18 Comments

Drunkard’s Walk

No, I’m not tipsy. It’s not-yet-coffee in the morning, and I’m leading a Forage Walk a little later today. I don’t need to be drunk to explain wild edible plants and ecology to folks, and I don’t need to be drunk to write, either, although there are time… ahem. Anyway, I was referring to the mathematical process that describes randomness, ” examples include the path traced by a molecule as it travels in a liquid or a gas, the search path of a foraging animal, the price of a fluctuating stock and the financial status of a gambler can all be approximated by random walk models, even though they may not be truly random in reality.” I’d run across this concept long before Bioinformatics class, where we discussed it as a Markov chain and used it to describe evolution and map out phylogenetic trees.  Read more

Aug 11

Moon
23 Comments

Introductions

How best to handle introducing new characters, new stories, and readers to one another? Well, my preference both as a writer and a reader is to get a sense of them, but not necessarily learn everything about them all up front at once. It’s a slow dance, a tease, a little here, a little there, and you get to know them, just like you do in real life. When you are introduced to a person in front of you, you might get their full name, or you might not. There’s formal introductions: “may I present Princess Hildegard of Aronia to you, Grand Duchess of Rexington?” and then there is: “so this is Joe, my plumber. He’s pretty good, if’n you don’t want it done fast.” With a wink and an elbow nudge. Read more

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